Amazing! I genuinely think that this is a bigger deal than the moon landings.

The moon landings were pretty awesome in their own way, but at the end of the day, with the way they were done, it was basically a stunt. None of it put any infrastructure for the long-term access of space into place, or anything to make future moon landings easier.

This paves the way for the costs of space flight to be cut in half, or even a little further. This has the potential to set off an exponential chain of growth of space travel. The further they cut prices, the more customers and launches there are. The more customers there are, the more profit they make, to be plowed back into better, more reliable, and more reusable rockets. And the more incentive their competitors have to come up with their own reusable rockets. The more reusable they are, the further they can bring prices down. Every step reinforces the next, and in 30-50 years, the price of a launch may well be a tenth of what it is today. Maybe closer to a hundredth.

What will we build when access to space costs 1% of what it does today? Maybe a huge space station, or a moon colony, or asteroid mining, or all of the above. The more traffic we have to space, the more infrastructure we build, and the cheaper and more reliable it all gets. Off-world colonies might become about as practical as a trip to and colony in Antarctica is today - still tough and hazardous, but well within the budget and vision of any developed nation. This is freakin' awesome for the future!

SpaceX is an amazing company that is moving innovation forward in leaps and bounds. I love this because it does bring people together and gets humans to look up, above problems and fighting and gets us realizing we are in this together.

I still cannot get over the reverse landing on the drone that first time[1] it was almost unreal and took them a while to get there [2]. That image is seared in my brain like the moon landing probably is for people who lived through that.

It was about a year ago and SpaceX is already, in less than a year, performed the reverse landing on the drone and successful relaunched. Amazing moment in human history and SpaceX continues to lead the way.

I've noticed that during the webcast they talked much more about their planetary colonisation project than they usually do. I guess it makes sense since today is the first time they actually implement the re-usability plan they believe is the key to this colonisation.

But frankly, is the cost of going to mars really that important for its colonisation? I mean, I wouldn't move to mars even if going there was free. For one, there's no breathable air, for Pete's sake. They are talking about building a city on a place where there isn't even breathable air. That's insane.

This whole thing is very conflicting to me. On one hand I can appreciate the technological achievement and I acknowledge that re-usability will be extremely useful for space exploration, but on the other hand I can't help thinking that those people who get excited about building a city on mars are completely delusional.

Makes up for the rocket they lost. Actually, now they're ahead if you count the insurance payout. People should stop saying we need to spend X trillions to get to Mars. They should instead say we can't get to Mars until technology is good enough that it will cost less than X billions or even millions.

When I was a kid the Shuttle was going to launch every week, but that turned out to be impossible given the amount of rework it required, the most flights it did in a year were 9, and it averaged around 4.5.

Forget the 24 hour turnaround. If SpaceX gets to the point where they have weekly launches it will be utterly delightful and amazing. Essentially to do that they have to not only make re-use work well, but also have to pass cost savings to customers to increase demand.

Watching the raw video stream today, I couldn't help but feel that we're looking at a quantum leap in rocket technology. The intensity of sound and exhaust from the engines was something I have never seen from a rocket that size before. I'm curious how the specific impulse of the newest Merlin compares to what ULA is using, considering a lot of their stuff is either Russian made or designs from the 60's. It's possible they will not only capture the launch market, but the engine market for other manufacturers as well.

I wonder whether we'll see a surge in on-orbit assembly if it becomes a lot cheaper to do two payload-X launches on reusable rockets than it is to do one payload-2X launch on an expendable rocket. Previously, economies of scale have tilted design toward the single-2X-launch approach.

Factors that might prevent this from making this economically superior to 'just' ramping up production are:

- the fraction of launches that can be reused.

- the amount of effort needed to prepare a rocket for reuse relative to that needed to produce a new rocket.

They will have been extra cautious this time, but from the above, the answers _could_ be "about 10%" and "almost one year, taking way more effort than building a new one does".

I would think the real answers are a bit better and will get even better over time, but I also don't think they already are at "close to 100%" and "a couple of weeks", because, if they were, I think they would have launched a used rocket earlier. I also am not convinced they can get there.

That's mostly guessing, though, as I'm not a rocket scientist and can't find hard information on this. Does anybody have that?

I noticed the problem on myself on several occasions and kind of invented the same solution.

For example, sometimes I would take a medicament mechanically while doing something else and just a few minutes later, forget if I took it or not. Solution: say loud to myself "I'm taking a pill".

Another: sometimes I'd lend some amount money to a colleague, and a few weeks later I'd have a hard time figuring whether they gave it back, and they too. Solution: I tell them to hit me (or do some other stupid thing) when they give the money back, so we both remember.

Going even further, sometimes I have to set a reminder to myself like "take an umbrella when leaving tomorrow morning because it's gonna be raining". Putting umbrella close to the exit, or doing a phone reminder do not always work, particularly when I'm in a hurry. One thing that works is doing some notable physical disruption in the environment, like putting a can of tomato sauce, upside-down, close to the exit.

If you dont point to the knot on your harness when calling out that you are tied in, and we dont audibly call out On belay... belay on to each other, we arent climbing together.

These exact same rituals have been developed for climbing because everyone, experienced, and inexperienced, can make mistakes.

The greatest climber of her generation (of any gender!), Lynn Hill, opens her autobiography with the story of how she was distracted while tying in, and nobody thought to check her, because, well, shes LYNN HILL.

She climbed 75 up an easy (for her) warmup climb, called for tension on the rope, sat back, and fell the entire distance to the ground. She was very lucky to survive.

Slightly off topic but this practice of talking-out-loud to get yourself doing stuff is also beneficial to people with executive dysfunction. If your executive function is impaired you generally don't have the "internal monologue" or the voice in your head. This makes seemingly simpler things like taking a shower, driving, or eating, very difficult! I'd often "forget" to eat, simply because I could not get myself to start.

I found that it helps to announce (not necessarily loud) what I am to do, and the steps to do so. ("Okay we're going to get up and walk to the kitchen.", "We're walking now")

Though for some reason I use plural pronouns for myself -- we, us etc. Does somebody else do that too? :)

This also applies to aviation. While pilots execute the same checklist several times each day, year after year, it is still required to verbally call the items on the list. It feels a bit strange doing it when you're sitting in a cockpit alone, but it does really improve accuracy and ensures you're following the same procedure every time whether there is a co-pilot, instructor or nobody sitting in the other seat.

I've never learned actually pointing at the instruments, but I can imagine it helps to focus for example very clearly on doing a check of a specific instrument instead of just saying "checked" out of habit. The problem of course is that you need your hands for other things at the same time, so pointing would be unsafe to do at the controls of a plane.

When debugging in production environments (which is always a bad idea) I use a technique where I always work together with a coworker and before I'm about to do something destructive I say out loud what I'm going to do and ask for agreement that I should continue. I started this after reading what happened at Gitlab a month ago.

I think that the root of this goes back all the way to Zen-type of thinking. In Zen, it's often taught that mind is elusive/delusive and action matters. "Mindlessness (mu-shin)" is often thought of the best way of carrying tasks, and I see a similar principle in many traditional martial arts/craftsmanship; a new learner should just do certain tasks without thinking/questioning, and eventually their muscle memory will learn it. It's conceivable that people applied the same principle for safety.

I also think that this illustrates the difference between the Western religions and Japanese (or Asian) religions. Western religions are mostly declarative; you need to believe such and such statements. Whereas Japanese religions are procedural, i.e. doing rituals is more important than believing.

The US Navy uses much of this as well. For example, here's an aircraft carrier launch from inside the "bubble" (the control area that actually triggers the steam catapult). The officer repeats the mantra aloud for each aircraft and points at the people he's checking. If you watch a similar video taken above deck you can see each responsible person point at the system they are monitoring before giving the thumb's up.

Wow this is fascinating. Clockwork, like everything else in Japan. I first noticed this when in Kyoto. The driver would point at the schedule, speedometer, sensors and all else. I found it slightly odd but made a mental note to google it later, which I eventually forgot.

(Based on the post we're commenting on, I guess our next step would be to recognize gestures like pointing...)

The app steps you through tasks by voice or text, and responds to your voice commands (it tries to provide optional "hands-free" operation as much as possible).

When you complete your checklist, the app optionally emails you (or a list of people) a detailed record of completion of the checklist, showing steps you completed, skipped, or possibly had to repeat.

For organizations, it's easy to export/import checklists. You can distribute by email, via iCloud, or you can download checklists from web links. For training, use of a checklist provides important reminders of how things should be done.

My dad's side of the family are a bunch of sailors, and there's a lot of verbal clues you give to other people on the boat when you're sailing. "Ready about" means we're about to tack.

My uncle was sailing a multi-day solo race, and he felt like he was just getting scattered. He started saying everything he would have said outloud-- saying "ready about" to no one, ordering himself to raise the spinnaker. He said everything ran much more smoothly once he started doing that. :D

We had the same sort of routine as this as factory workers in Japan so that we wouldn't forget to check/do soemthing. These explicit motions help you hit all the necessary components each time when working with hundreds of repetitions a day.

Been living in Japan for a while now and I've noticed this too. I always admired it. It suggested a high level of conscientiousness. Made me feel safer on public transit. Interesting to learn of the real world benefit of these type of mnemonic tricks. I do some things like this when doing operational work as a devops engineer. Helps me avoid fat finger mistakes. I also do the classic, "wallet, phone, keys" check whenever I leave the house.

I've lived in Japan off and on for a number of years. "Pointing and shouting," and other similar gestures, are used all over the place. I typically heard it referred to as "yubisashi kakunin," which basically means "confirm by pointing with your finger." I've seen elevator attendants do it when operating the buttons, and cashiers will verbalize the counting of change, and hand it back in a very animated way, which I believe is the same sort of thing.

Where I live, I think a company would have to really work to get their employees to do it, but in Japan, it seems to have become a part of the culture. My wife, who is from Japan, does it while she's cooking to make sure she hasn't left anything out.

Very interesting! The word 'embarrassing' comes up a lot, but I wonder why this would be perceived as embarrassing compared to, say, the ritual bowing to empty carriages that takes place on Japanese trains. Or simply compared to the gesturing that takes place in other professions like the construction industry.

Without knowing the psychology behind it, a good guess would be that it derives from the sense that observers may not understand one's intent in pointing, and could prob be alleviated by using some kind of beacon like those used by aircraft marshallers.

I consider the article's title to be clickbaity. The fact of the story is why the workers point at things and there's an interesting explanation behind it. Saying they can't stop, however, isn't a true statement and would have been much better if they stated the real affirmative.

This is similar to a yoga in the Hindu religion. I read about this a while back. When performing this yoga, you call out every action silently or quietly. So, for example, when picking up your cup of coffee..."I am going to pick up this coffee", then.."I picked up the coffee".

God that's cool. I have a habit that seems like a variant of this. Every change I write has a description of how it's tested. Sometimes that can be as brief as "unittests," but for riskier changes I sometimes write several paragraphs.

I was in Japan eight years ago and saw this but never understood what was going on. I have a video of a conductor pointing over and over and over again I made a gif out of. I am enthused to know what was going on.

So, in Japan there's a superhero franchise on television called Super Sentai (you might know it as where Power Rangers gets their source footage from). Each year, they do a different Super Sentai series with its own distinct theme. Well, in 2014, they did a train-themed series called ToQger (ToQ being a cutesy spelling of Tokky, meaning "express train"). The show is absolutely full of references to everything to do with trains; the theme is present everywhere.

Pre-battle poses are tradition in Super Sentai, and ToQger was no exception. Specifically, the pose ends with the team's leader dramatically pointing while calling shuppatsu shink, which basically means "all aboard!".

That's very interesting. I do it myself, but not because I had any idea it really worked, it's just habit. When I am hitching up our trailer and getting ready to set out on a road trip, I walk around it pointing at things and calling them out loud to myself -- hitch pins, safety pins, sway bars, various things that have to be stowed, etc. Now I can tell my wife it's not because I'm senile, but because it works :)

I listened to a podcast about police doing something similar. When two officers we're approaching a situation way office would call or multiple times before taking an action. For example, "TASER! TASER! TASER!". this helps the other officer from mistaking the sound of the taser firing for a firearm.

It makes a lot of sense, you are performing a physical act, a visual act and a verbal act together, all reinforcing each other. Once it becomes an ingrained habit, anything that doesn't match the common result sticks out. I presume overcoming your fear of looking stupid is the hardest part.

Next time your on the NYC subway watch for the conductor as the train comes to a stop. They always point out the window at a marker that helps them know where to stop the train. Seems to be a very minimal version of what this article is taking about. But I always get a kick out of it.

I've been playing this "brain training" game called Peak and one of the tasks is to memorize the names of some places that I don't even think actually exist. I struggled to remember it until I started mentally writing out each name. My finger, even though it wasn't moving, felt each word as it was written. I went from recalling approximately 80% to almost 100% of (so far) 9 places to remember.

It totally increases your consciousness and once you actually realize what's happening, you want to be that present everywhere. Unfortunately, I am a machine :(

In Saitama I saw an old guy on a pedal bike (not a train) who did this the other day!

In fact, I made a note specifically to ask a Nihon friend just what the hell he was doing (so I'll just ask HN instead)...

I understand stopping at an intersection and looking both ways. But making a specific pointing gesture and verbally calling out while doing it I thought was just a bit odd. Particularly cause he was the only person at this quiet little 4 way (no lights) stop. Sounded like he said "hayougush... hayougush".

I wonder if there's some way to apply this to coding. Besides annoying my co-workers, would verbally talking about what I'm coding improve the quality of my code, or productivity? What about physical gestures?

I do that sometimes when I'm coding. I want to debug something, or just check some particularly important or tricky part and I say the lines outloud while doing some hand movement pointing to the lines kind of rithmically.

When looking for something I use my phone's torch and point on the floor. Last time I found back a little magnet lost by my kid in the 50 metres of alley to our place. So yes I guess it works to force the mental focus.

I think I'd go insane if that was my job. It seems so utterly dehumanizing to have a human do that job every day. I don't mean just the pointing but the standing and doing things that surely computers and cameras could easily do.

1. HEADLINE: A way to have different scaling for external monitors hooked up to my HiDPI laptop.

Currently I need can only set a single scaling factor, so I need to ajust my laptop screen resolution to match scaling of the external monitor. If that's not possible, a way to automatically set resolution and scale for both screens once you hook one up would already save me a lot of manual switching and restarting lightDM!

I'm constantly running out of space in /boot, due to kernel updates. It drives me so incredibly batty. If I had to guess, this is due to poor defaults in the installer for folks that opt to encrypt their whole disk. Even still, this system was setup back on 14.04 (don't think it started on 12.04), and I have no intention of reinstalling from scratch just to fix it.

Publish something official on how to fix this problem! Make it easy and stress free! Yell at the people who didn't catch this bug before it went out! Sorry, but this is just a really bad problem: it leads to folks like me wasting time, and probably a whole bunch of other folks just not being able to install updates, and no idea why.

I've noticed that my system often hangs unrecoverably with a blank screen during dock/undock and sleep/wake events. I've learned, though, that I can reduce the likelihood of having problems by trying to minimize the number of state changes that the system has to handle at once. For example, if I'm leaving the house with the laptop, I'll first open the lid, wait 10 seconds to see if the display wants to turn on or not, undock it, wait 10 seconds for it to adjust, and only then put it to sleep. Same thing waking it up: one step at a time, with 10 second pauses in between. Seems to reduce my problems by about 90%. As a developer, this screams "race conditions" to me, but what do I know? If there's a bug filed for this already, I wouldn't know -- no idea what I'd search for.

I take the uptime game pretty seriously: having to reboot means that I lose a ton of context. Right now, I've got nine separate workspaces/desktops going, all with several browser, terminal, etc. windows. A reboot means I'll spend anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes installing updates and recovering all of that state. It's painful. Right now, my system has only been up for 9 days, which is weak sauce.

- DESCRIPTION: I know this is a touchy subject and I'm not looking to self-righteously re-re-re-ligitage everything but... between Intel walking away, licensing concerns, Ubuntu varients not jumping onboard, and various community concerns, would you re-consider abandoning mir and joining forces with Wayland? I understand you felt there were some technical shortcomings regarding how input devices were handled. Perhaps in today's climate those concerns can be better addressed by Wayland if you can provide the engineering leadership on those efforts?

High-DPI support is really bad in Ubuntu right now, and multiple external monitors are poorly supported. Here are some of problems I experience regularly:

- Ubuntu won't remember screen configurations when unplugging and "replugging" external monitors, which means I have to reconfigure them again and again.

- Often Ubuntu will freeze / crash when unplugging external monitors or when powering the laptop up after putting it in sleep mode and unplugging the monitor cable while the laptop sleeps. The only safe way to unplug a monitor is to first manually disable it in the "Display" settings, which honestly is not acceptable.

- Ubuntu often does not even notice when monitors get unplugged, hence it keeps displaying apps on (now unplugged) monitors. When opening the "Display" settings it will usually recognize the mistake and remove the extra monitors from the config.

- High DPI in general is still poorly supported in apps and the performance is very bad compared to e.g. Windows, to the point that I'm not even able to play 4k videos.

- Some keyboard/mouse gestures don't work on secondary monitors (e.g. using the arrow keys to navigate through menus)

Role: CTO

---

ADDENDUM:

By high-DPI I especially mean 4k displays (e.g. 3840 pixels wide), which are becoming more popular and which are almost completely unusable without proper DPI scaling.

Another problem with the "Display" settings dialogue is the weird behavior when dragging window icons around to arrange them: Often they will get stuck or outright refuse to move where I want them to be, such that I need to resort to some hacks (e.g. moving monitors around each other in circles) to get them where I want them to be. Also, when plugging in an external monitor often Ubuntu will not detect it correctly and display it as having a resolution of 800x600 pixels, refusing to adjust it or enable the monitor. The only way to fix this is to reboot the machine.

In general I want to thank all developers of Ubuntu, which -while not perfect- is still by far my preferred OS for any serious development work.

- DESCRIPTION: X11 is old, slow, and full of security issues. Mir, even in alpha, is much more responsive and provies important 21st centry feature set. Wayland is already used by a major distro. X11 is that cobweb that's gone uncleaned in our closet for too long.

- HEADLINE: Improve UI.

- DESCRIPTION: When I use Ubuntu it's often easier to use the terminal then to learn the 10 different UIs to configure everything. This makes it impossible to convert specific people to using Ubuntu because they just don't have the time to learn all of the terminal-spells I know. Ideally there'd be a single place that could detect most configs for standard packages and a way to add hooks to that to get your package to show up in that menu. I don't know if this exists but if it does it's definetly not used.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: "Undergraduate Research Associate", I program and do sysadmin stuff for a department at my college.

FLAVOR: DesktopHEADLINE: Pick an official laptop for the release.ROLE: End-user, Sysadmin, Developer

I would love for Ubuntu to, with each release, pick a laptop vendor and a laptop and just Make It Work.

All the components. Out of the box. As near perfect as one can get it. So when I'm in the market for a new laptop, I can just buy that one. And I'm not talking about a pro gear like the XPS. Just simple, cheap consumer stuff.

- DESCRIPTION: Trackpad config situation is a mess. Pretty much every Ubuntu derivative has its own simplified (reads severely lacking) interface. What's worse is the gestures configuration. It's mostly done via some dude's one off scripts found on some forum post 2 years ago.

Give me a MacOS like experience on the trackpad (especially the 3/4 finger workspace switching) and I'd never look back on MacOS again.

- DESCRIPTION: This one is hard to pin down, but I'd like to see more general polish and stability in the Unity desktop. One example would be around multi-monitor support, it's pretty good, but a bit funky in some places.

For example, if I have a monitor plugged in and I let the laptop screen lock come on, I can sit there and watch while both displays cycle through an On -> Off -> On -> Off loop. I think when one display goes to sleep it sends a signal which wakes the machine back up, or something.

I'd also like to see more options for configuring multiple mice/trackpads/trackballs in the Settings app, general improvements to quality-of-life issues which are very noticable when transitioning from, say, macOs to Ubuntu.

One more polish issue: I'd like to see more attention paid to power-drain regressions in the OS. I had an issue recently where a process related to automatic updates was spinning in the background and consuming 100% of a CPU core, and cutting my battery time in half compared to what it should have been. I looked into it and found it was a known issue that wasn't fixed yet, but could be solved by deleting one of the default apps. If I were a less sophisticated user I would have just concluded that battery-life simply sucked on Ubuntu, and frankly I would have been right.

[EDIT: all these issues were encountered on a Thinkpad T460, which should really be one of the best supported machines in the world for this OS. If things are flaky under the best of circumstances, I dread to think what it's like on some weirdo Siemens laptop some user might have]- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software Developer

- DESCRIPTION: Right now mouse acceleration is enabled by default, and for heavy mouse users this is really not usable. There is no way to change this behaviour in the mouse settings. The only way as a user to get a workable mouse configuration is with custom startup scripts, and it took me as an experienced Linux user and software engineer a long time to figure out exactly how (The recommended way to do this kept changing). Non-expert users cannot be expected to do the same. All it needs is a checkbox or possibly a slider in the Mouse & Touchpad settings to configure the acceleration speed.

- DESCRIPTION: I'd love to buy hardware from Canonical that will just work, just like I do with Apple. Dell comes close, but not close enough that I will recommend it to people. System76 build quality is something I hear people complain about, so I can't recommend them either.

- DESCRIPTION: Currently I have to run "pulseaudio -k" every time I turn on my HDMI flatscreen because after I turn it off at night the audio switches to the built-in speakers- but not the other way around when I turn it back on.

I understand users want stability in the core OS, but there's no reason it should be made so difficult to install up-to-date software from elsewhere. `apt` is useless for installing things like `youtube-dl` because old versions of youtube-dl quickly stop being compatible with YouTube.

Ubuntu's current solution to this problem is PPAs, which are very non-ideal because they only work if someone maintains a PPA, but this involves:

1. googling for the software's PPA, 2. finding the PPA, 3. possibly trusting a third-party PPA maintainer, 4. running at least three different commands, which you have to either memorize or re-google

Basically all software's Ubuntu installation instructions are something like "curl this script and pipe to bash" or "build from source" or "install this other package manager, then use the other package manager to install our software", just because it's impossible to install the latest version using Ubuntu's built-in package manager out-of-the-box.

For instance, here's Redis: "Installing it using the package manager of your Linux distribution is somewhat discouraged as usually the available version is not the latest."

I want to be able to do something like `apt install-latest youtube-dl` to get a usable version of youtube-dl, and considering the number of workarounds for this issue I find online, I think a lot of other people have the same want.

DESCRIPTION: I know Canonical has put a lot of effort into Mir and at this stage it is probably "too big to fail". But for various reasons my bet is that it will fail. I think this is Canonical repeating Microsoft's Metro mistake. I have a $12K dollar desktop and I don't want an OS optimized for phones !!! I will be able to avoid it but I would rather your engineering effort was better placed.

- DESCRIPTION: Right now it isn't possible to switch workspaces on two or more monitors independently. This is possible on Mac, and is a huge productivity boost. Coming home from work to use my personal Ubuntu machine always feels like a step backwards for this reason alone.

I want to be able to have one monitor for my IDE, and one monitor for terminal /vim, browser instances, music, etc. I like to keep different virtual desktops "scoped" to different things--eg. "documentation and code" vs "personal email". When I switch between these on one monitor, it also switches the space on the other monitor. They should be entirely independent of one another.

If I'm looking at something on my left monitor, but want to look at something different on my right monitor, why make me switch both of them away? The lack of ability to independently control the desktops on each monitor makes me super sad. :(

Seriously, right now an Ubuntu Desktop isn't a secure choice for users, especially if they have to expect targeted attacks.

Some things I'd propose:

* Dangerous automation features need to be either disabled by default or heavily audited. That includes things like tracker and apport.

* In general I wonder how much auditing happens before something enters Ubuntu. Some basic auditing that could also be automated like testing packages with asan should be a default inclusion criterion for adding packages.

* Currently there are no bug bounties at all in the Linux distribution world. I get that this is a financial challenge, but at least in severe cases where the fault clearly lies within the distribution and not within an external project I'd consider bug bounties appropriate. (Just read Donncha's blog post linked above. He could've gotten $10.000 from a shady exploit dealer and he got nothing, because he did the right thing.)

ROLE: I'm running the Fuzzing Project and I write for IT tech media about security issues.

- DESCRIPTION: Instead of reinventing the wheel with Unity8/Mir, please join Wayland development and maybe join forces with Linux Mint and switch from Unity to Cinnamon or MATE, with Flatpak supports for desktop apps.

- DESCRIPTION: by including f.lux / redshift , Ubuntu will be helping users to get better sleep . I know it's very difficult to accommodate requests for default apps, but macOS and iOS has Night Shift, Android has Night Mode.

- DESCRIPTION: I use headphones every day. I listen to music and podcasts while I work. I use youtube videos and screencasts to learn new things. Sometimes I hop on a VOIP call through one service or the other. The one feature I miss most from Windows Desktop life is the "volume normalization" checkbox in my sound settings. It protects me from opening a new chrome tab and blasting noise into my ears at +30db. It protects me from that guy on the voice call that has his mic level WAY too high. It helps me hear the other guy who can't get his mic above a whisper. Most of all I never have to fiddle with individual application volume levels. Linux Desktops love to crib ideas from Apple, but for some reason they've all ignored this killer feature from 2006.

- DESCRIPTION: The difference in responsiveness can be remarkable if it's lowered on systems with more ram. Most laptops and pc's these days have 4gb on average but the ones with hdds will be very slow on ubuntu because of default vm.swappiness vm.dirty_ratio vm.dirty_background_ratio etc that are set for older machines. Adding this feature will make ubuntu a better experience for most nontechnical people.

DESCRIPTION: I never managed to have my PC playing music through blutooth to a bluetooth loudspeaker. (I'm using Xbuntu, playing mp3s with mpv.) I think it could be because the audio system seems messy: should I have jackd enabled? What is it? So maybe the headline should be to cleanup audio system, specially its routes.

HEADLINE: Embrace the spirit of Open Source, not just comply with the letter of the law

DESCRIPTION:

Here's an extract from the Software Freedom Conservancy report on Canonical's licensing policy:

> Redistributors of Ubuntu have little choice but to become expert analysts of Canonical, Ltd.'s policy. They must identify on their own every place where the policy contradicts the GPL. If a dispute arises on a subtle issue, Canonical, Ltd. could take legal action, arguing that the redistributor's interpretation of GPL was incorrect. Even if the redistributor was correct that the GPL trumped some specific clause in Canonical, Ltd.'s policy, it may be costly to adjudicate the issue.

- DESCRIPTION: the WLAN UI supports some OpenVPN options, but not all, and fails silently on importing non-compatible config files. This is very confusing for new Desktop users.

- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: multi-column list view in nautilus

- DESCRIPTION: This view has been explicitly dropped (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/7081...) but is very useful for quickly navigating large directories. Alternatively, replace Nautilus with a file manager that can do this (like Nemo). This is one area where the Windows file manager is still much better.

- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: polish file dialogs (multi-column-list view)

- DESCRIPTION: the default file-open and file-save dialogs lack many simple features that can save a lot of time. For example, in the file-open dialog there is no multi-column view (see above), you cannot rename files, you cannot create files/folders, you cannot access the normal context menu. All this requires separately opening a file manager, which also lacks a few productivity features (see above).

- DESCRIPTION: I needed a bunch of compiz plugins to make this work in a halfway decent way in a 2-monitor setup, and I dread the day I will have to re-shuffle this for a 3-monitor setup etc. Make it easy to move a window 1) from one monitor to the other, 2) resize and move to one of the corners/sides, 3) maximize it. Also, applications in full-screen mode on one of the monitors confuse my compiz-based setup (for example, a full-screen Chrome window on one monitor will introduce numerous UI issues).

Still, it's a great system and very nice to use overall.

Thanks for gathering feedback. That's the first step ;-) Keep up the good work!

A disclaimer: I'm not using Ubuntu, but I'd like to see the switch from Mir to Wayland for Ubuntu, or even better - making Mir a Wayland compositor. That would benefit Linux desktop as a whole, instead of creating another rift. Current direction that Mir is taking is causing damage to global Linux community.

To give context. Mir was started, because some Ubuntu developers saw deficiencies in Wayland (which later was proven to be incorrect). Over time, Mir started borrowing stuff from Wayland compositors and input libraries anyway, and now simply mirrors most of what Wayland does.

TL;DR there is no valid reason for this rift, and it should really go away. This will make life easier for graphics drivers developers, GUI toolkits developers, SDL (and the like) developers, various developers of applications like screen recording and so on. And having this rift benefits no one.

- DESCRIPTION: The user should be able to 1) drag any executable to the dock to make a new launcher 2) Right click any launcher to be able to choose a dialog to customize command line arguments, initial working directory, and icon.

The user should not have to edit a desktop item file or install or know about Alacarte. Windows got this one right.

This happened because ubuntu decided to unbundle some packages that come as a part of the python ecosystem. This is really a major annoyance because it breaks default behavior that people have come to rely on in every other platform, and confuses the hell out of people - just google for similar keywords and you'll find tons of questions and discussions around this and similar issues. Please don't mess with this stuff, or if you're going to break them, break them in a way that tells the user what the heck to do - it costs real hours and effort to debug and work around these things for production deployments.

DESCRIPTION: As a developer, I spent most of my time in the terminal. Having ctrl-alt-t to open a terminal is super helpful, but the default positioning is less than ideal because there is a lot of wasted space with the default terminal size, and a lot of overlapping for a large size. I used to use x-tile in Ubuntu 14.04 and its "quad-<something>" option, but it is broken in Ubuntu 16.10 at least for me (dual monitor). I now use ctrl-alt-<numpad keys> to organize the windows, but still feel there has to be something better than that.

- DESCRIPTION: Reducing the amount of blue light during the night is proven to help people finding sleep after having used their computer at night. So during the night, the desktop automatedly reduce the amount of blue light emitted on the screen by shifting the color balance.

- DESCRIPTION: I'm not a Linux guy, but when I've tried it I'm always annoyed at how ugly text looks compared to macOS. It would be great if we could pick different text renderers or have a new one with an easy GUI for adjusting parameters.

- HEADLINE: no new features please, just bugfixes and small adjustments

- DESCRIPTION: please spend at least one, maybe more releases working on polishing existing features and bugfixes. Ubuntu is like 90% there to be the standard desktop of Linux, and the remaining 10% is NOT in adding new features but making sure the existing ones work reliably and consistently. Yes, this is not as exciting as working on new features, but it is exactly what "professional" software development is about. It is pretty easy to get a software 80% done, much harder to get to 90%, but the really great stuff is when you get above 95%. The best OS is the one that JUST WORKS, and you don't even notice it. Same for the UI. So why not take a look at your bugtracker :)

- FLAVOR: all?- HEADLINE: Improve experience of using 3rd-party apt sources- DESCRIPTION: This suggestion is more apt related, but Ubuntu could lead the improvements. Many software providers (Microsoft, Elastic, etc) are using their own apt repositories to be able to deliver updates faster than the Ubuntu release cycle, which is great. However, configuring them usually requires Googling the instructions and at least 3 commands. For example, installing SQL Server for Linux has the following commands before you can even run apt-get install (from their official documentation):

That is not user-friendly at all. It would be great if apt could help you out here. i.e. if I type in "apt install mssql-server", it could detect that it is not in the Ubuntu sources but that it is available in a trusted 3rd party source, and prompt me to add that source to my local apt sources. It would then also automatically update that source.

Also, perhaps the Ubuntu sources have an older version but a newer version is available at a trusted 3rd party, and provide an informational message and an apt command-line flag that would allow you to add the source. i.e. "mssql-server 17.0.0 is available at the third party source 'microsoft'. To install it, run 'apt install mssql-server -S microsoft'" which would add the microsoft source and install the package.- ROLE: software engineer

On systems that have very little customization, I regularly get 1-2 crashes after the login that ask me to report them again and again. Systems regularly fail to boot after upgrading the kernel when proprietary Nvidia drivers are installed (the ones Ubuntu suggested to me), because stuff is not properly recompiled. The file manager crashes when connecting to a SAMBA share for the first time during a session.

I can fix this crap (although I'm getting tired of it), but for regular users, they go straight back to Windows. Stuff like that simply can't happen in a stable release or at least it needs to be fixed ASAP.

I like Ubuntu, but think that you are handling the support for multiple releases poorly and it might be better for everyone to switch to a rolling release, like Windows did. The users would get better support and updates and your developers would have more time to improve the software, instead of managing broken releases. As it is now, you are getting buried in bugs and there's no end to it.

DESCRIPTION: GNU/Linux - X'ish desktop environments systems in general and window managers in particular - used to have a certain way and freedom to be able to do things. Around 2000-2005 I was quite happy with FVWM, KDE3 etc. The window managers allowed me to do things that weren't possible with Windows or Mac. (Focus follows mouse, configurable behavious, handle many windows with ease...) I wish Windows or macOS won't be considered as ideal solutions and GNU/Linux just being a bad copy of that. If that's really the best thing, then it's a better idea to actually use MS Windows or macOS - I use the latter since 5 years almost exclusively. Just recently I started using Linux (Xubuntu) again privately on an older computer and at work as well. (At work we don't have Macs)

Please come up with your own ideas - nobody except "computer experts" use Linux on the Desktop anyways. You could go from there. Also looking at Xubuntu, it's a cool system. I really like it because it's fast, I can work with more than 5 windows comfortably. Unfortunately its bluetooth config is worse - recently I had to login to Cinnamon to make my Bluetooth mouse work again. Same goes for multi monitor, it works okay. ;) That means: when I disconnect my laptop from the external screens, open the display and go to the meeting it's black. I have to shut it down if I want to use it. (Power button or SysRq...)

So yeah, if Windows gets got enough (read: they finally get rid of all these freezes and things that just stop working) and they Opensource even more stuff, why not use Windows? I must admit, I'm no Opensource prophet so my primary reason to start switching to Linux around '98 was because Windows was mega buggy, slow and not nice to use on average hardware when the installation was more than a few months ago. IMHO true Opensource people use Debian, Arch or some unusual combination - like Windows as main OS with Emacs and Arch in the VM like a friend of mine.

Again is a time with so much potential for Ubuntu Desktop because devs are increasingly unhappy with macOS.

Sometimes the packages fail to build. This tells me that you do not have an automated build regression system, even though Debian has gone to great pains to make this easy to automate.

I have hit bugs in packages because there is a large stack of diffs that have been applied to the package (logrotate is one example), but never upstreamed. The logrotate diffs include a "security patch" that is not well thought out, does not actually close a real bug, and causes logrotate to silently fail, filling /var.

This would not happen if you actively upstreamed patches, and reverted changes that are not approved by upstream, or addressed in other ways by upstream developers.

These two systematic issues have caused me to move away from Ubuntu for server and desktop use.

Finally, I've heard stories about Ubuntu devs forcing through controversial votes in the Debian project, and noticed an uptick in user-hostile decisions by the Debian project (like the forced systemd migration).

As a major contributor to Debian, Ubuntu should do whatever it can to improve the health of the Debian community, and generally improve the code quality + stability of upstream debian projects (without just killing off stuff that Ubuntu has decided not to ship).

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Engineer/Researcher At work, we ship a hardware appliance based on Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu / Debian as my primary development environment for almost two decades, and am saddened by the level of bitrot I've encountered over the last 2-3 years.

DESCRIPTION: For my son's first computer, I picked Lubuntu and spent days making it "internet ready". I installed Dansguardian + Privoxy, then added uBlock Origin to Chrome, then added OpenDNS to my home router. It was a lot of searching online and trial & error but worth it. From time to time, I check websites he visited and what got blocked (grepping logs) and adjust accordingly. One problem with this is updates are blocked so I must disable proxy manually every time I update.

Please consider making something like this available out-of-the-box. Something that can be enabled/disabled with a few clicks. Also, a simple way to review history and adjust settings. It would make Ubuntu an excellent choice out-of-the-box for all kids. Thank you for asking.

DESCRIPTION: i3 offers a vastly superior power-user usage experience, pretty much compared to anything else in the market. If Ubuntu would offer a properly configured/themed/integrated i3 desktop, I'd be happy to use it, because I've done enough pointless fine tuning for one lifetime. I'd be fine with some other tiling window manager too, as long as if it was at least as good as i3. I have doubts that this could be done properly with Unity, but I won't mind being surprised.

I'm using Ubuntu full time for the past 4 years. Some how it still feels like I am using some what old software although Ubuntu has come a long way since the beginning. I don't mind a release with no new technical improvements but only dedicated to improve all the little details and a polished experience of the overall user experience. Given looks are one of the important factors for an average user to evaluate a desktop, I believe any effort on this front will help a lot if furthering ubuntu adoption.

- DESCRIPTION: Please have an auto-hide function at minimum? Better would be to move the time/settings to the "dock" when you set the "move the menus to the app windows" option, and then removing menubar entirely.

- RATIONALE: It was awful the last time I used Ubuntu on a multi-monitor setup, wasting space on all displays. And having to click an app and window to give it focus, then swinging the cursor up to select a menu, then back to the app... I'm not sure why anyone would move the action (menu) from the context of the action (focused window).

Otherwise, I really do like Unity, especially since it has useful global keybindings out of the box.

- HEADLINE: optimize Ubuntu for people who suffer migraines/headaches and other health issues when working with displays.

- DESCRIPTION: There's a small niche of users who suffer badly when working with displays. There are all sorts of things to optimize(mostly to kill various flickers and too much brightness) - no backlight refresh by putting backlight at 100% and using some screen filter app , 16-bit resolution(32-bit in some display types is causing some flicker), up-convertion of videos to the highest frame-rate possible(if it's possible to do so for web videos - would be amazing!!!), various night modes and brightness controls, maybe recommending screens and devices that would help(selection is a huge issue).

btw, if you manage to really help here, this user niche will be very loyal, and will suffer a lot on other areas. Also - a well optimized machine, might be liked by regular users in a subtle way(less tired, etc).

DESCRIPTION:You have no idea how upset I am the top comment is more "fancy, flashy" stuff instead of what Ubuntu really needs:

Stability. Better QA, not having my family and friends see another "$x had an issue" every time they boot into their accounts and being embarrassed that I recommended Ubuntu to them.

Seriously, I use gentoo, and my gf uses GNOME Ubuntu, and she has issues with the same services that I don't have a single issue with. Forget about multitouch or external monitors, no one other than fanboys and enthusiasts use that. Provide a stable experience first then move the boundary.

ROLE/AFFILIATION: Computational scientist, but also a Linux enthusiast for personal use.

- DESCRIPTION: I like byobu, it's extremely helpful but I would prefer the purge-old-kernels script to be in a separate package. I like to run servers with the minimum amount of packages installed and don't really need byobu since most of my maintenance are remote commands. /boot gets filled up quickly and the purge-old-kernels is a script I think is well written and perfect. I want it separated from byobu, please.

- DESCRIPTION: Turns out you have two choices for a well-built ultralight notebook: a MacBook (1250) or a Chromebook (250). The Chromebook can run Ubuntu, and run it well. But right now it requires a specially optimised version of Ubuntu (GalliumOS) and faffing around with firmware versions. If Ubuntu was easy to install on Chromebooks as it is on desktops or regular notebooks, that'd be a massive selling point for the OS.

- DESCRIPTION: I'm well aware that many hard-core users don't care that much about visual aesthetics of the user interface, but I think this makes up a lot of the impression first-time users have of Ubuntu. While solid and generally fine, the built-in themes look could use some overhaul, or replacement. One of the first things I do when setting up a new instance is downloading and installing third-party themes and icon sets. It's funny how some people are surprised "how good Linux can look", because many still have the impression of it being a hacky, patchy, hard-to-use nerd OS.

- DESCRIPTION: Currently it is impossible to use the Ubuntu installer to install Ubuntu on only part of a disk if you want the Ubuntu partitions to be encrypted. (If it's not impossible, it's hard enough to figure out that this advanced user couldn't, so it might as well be impossible for new users.)

Disk encryption is a requirement nowadays, and many users want to dual boot when they first install Ubuntu. So this prevents users from even trying Ubuntu.

-DESCRIPTION: Pipe dream, but: the ability to run games with an AMD graphics card, the way we could with 15.10. Google "Steam AMD Xenial" and you'll see how big of a mess this is.

As of a year ago, gaming on Linux was pretty viable with an AMD graphics card, using fglrx. However, because that was deprecated, it was removed in 16.04, and the open-source drivers can't handle 3D games, at all. Most 2D games are non-starters as well, literally: the graphics freeze before I even get to the opening screen and I have to REISUB. I'm running an R9 390, but this is widespread among basically all AMD cards.

AMDGPU is an option, but only for some cards, and thats only for 16.04 - it won't run on 16.10.

I could go more into the history and the compatibility, but suffice to say, the intersection of the different versions of {the kernel, mesa, opengl, fglrx, open-source drivers} on Ubuntu now means that I have no choice but to boot into Windows to run games.

- DESCRIPTION: I usually use macOS but occassionally use Ubuntu and I really miss the ability to lookup functionality in my application by typing the name of a menu entry under help. On macOS this will drop down the relevant drop down menu and show the menu entry I am searching for. I use this a lot. Especially in complex applications this is very useful to have.

- DESCRIPTION: The fragmentation in the linux desktop is getting retarded, both effort (GNOME and Unity) are crippled by the lack of colaboration in the toolkits and applications. This was a marvel up until ubuntu 10.10 which was the last linux that anyone would need. I just miss the good old days.

- DESCRIPTION: This is probably stretching the limits of everything being fair game. Nevertheless, I've always found Ubuntu support for MBPs to be below par and haven't been able to justify using it over OSX since switching hardware. Now that Apple seem to be losing the plot on the hardware side I'd really like to see Ubuntu running as a first class citizen on a high end laptop.

No plastic cases, no innovative features (I mean touch bars or dials not 4k monitors), just fast, quality kit with superb software support.

ROLE / AFFILIATION: Contract Java developer, long time Ubuntu user but not on a desktop for a few years now

Running pro audio apps under any linux distro is still pretty much a pain, mostly due to the problem of getting a low latency audio server to run without lots of manual configuration at the risk of breaking your system, by installing jackd, running a rt kernel, and not breaking existing sound servers (pulseaudio).

_Audio stack and drivers_

Google has announced that android O 8.x would ship with a completely new low latency audio server, enabling pro audio apps under android, all such apps have been iOS, OSX and windows exclusives up until now.

Since google has done it under android it should be doable on GNU/Linux ?

However running these DAWs at rock-solid low latency with an up to date audio interface is hard/impossible for config issues and lack of driver support.

This would most likely require engaging discussion with audio interface manufacturers to develop/port their drivers to linux (Focusrite, Presonus, RME, Avid, Roland, Tascam) Focusrite Scarlett in particular is the best selling enthusiast-level USB 2.0 audio interface range in the world today, with Presonus a close second. RME, Apogee, AVID, MOTU, etc. are high-end stuff that will not appeal to enthusiasts. RME already has rock-solid support under linux.

_Multi-touch_

Most current and future audio DAWs and apps are going the down the multi-touch route (Bitwig, Presonus Studio One, etc). Sanitizing the audio stack on linux and enabling proper touch support would allow Pro audio apps to run on linux (most likely using WINE at first, as most pro VSTs are windows -- or mac -- only).

Considering all the privacy issues and crap ads that ship with win10 (browsing through pro audio forums will show you that that most people are stuck with win7 for running their DAW computer, do not want to upgrade to win10, and win7 support will stop really soon) and the absolute ripoff that the Apple HW is nowadays, linux might become attractive to audio enthusiasts, maybe pros in the long run?

- DESCRIPTION: I have seen Fedora updates as binary diffs. It is very small, uses less bandwidth and space, and gets installed faster.

This request isn't really for Ubuntu 17.10 though (I don't know if there is enough time for this). And I don't wish (actually I hate) this to be an Ubuntu specific feature. I wish this to be an upstream (Debian) feature.

- DESCRIPTION: There is currently no clean way to have a script run only once post-install, first boot. There are hacks for making this work to a degree, including things like self-deleting init scripts. I would most prefer to see this hook officially supported in robust way.

Description: If a user has a media file or application that wants to play surround sound audio, 5.1 or higher, it should work properly and automatically. AC3, Dolby Digital, dts, etc. should all function properly with all different hardware configurations.

I'm aware that it is possible to make it work properly with some effort, but it is not elegant or automatic. The user should not have to do anything special. It should "just work".

For example, a user has a surround sound system connected to their computer's optical output. They play a media file or DVD that has a surround sound audio track. That audio track is selected. The surround sound should play properly with no further special configuration. The user should not have to know that pulse audio or whatever even exists.

DESCRIPTION: Ubuntu already has a package for PyPy compatible with CPython 2.7 in the official repositories. However, a CPython 3.5 compatible version was recently released[1]. PyPy is painful to compile on your own if you dont have enough RAM. Therefore, an official package would be welcome.

- DESCRIPTION: Updating GPU driver can be a pain especially after a kernel version upgrade. Common issues you would see includes a black screen (kernel module incompatible), the login screen stuck in a loop (unity or compiz problem).

on notebook, this could be worse, as some notebooks have 2 gpus. and linux gets confused at which one to use.

I hope you could work with notebook hardware company to fully test a notebook product with a discrete gpu. given how popular deep learning is these days, developers really need a linux notebook with gpu computing.

- DESCRIPTION: The [audio] Bluetooth stack is in an embarrassingly malfunctional state, especially after the move to Bluez 5. Based on my tests on multiple machines and devices, even simply connecting a BT headphone requires hacks of the BT stack. Historically, the [audio] BT stack has always been in malfunctional state, regardless of the latest developments.

DESCRIPTION: Tiling wms are great. However most have regressions compared to Unity; e.g. need to wrestle with systemd to get screen locking on suspend working, weird interaction issues between gnome daemons, etc. Easy enough to get a nicely functioning system with some googling, but it'd be great to have a tiling wm with no integration issues out of the box. Perhaps fork i3 and add what's needed to make it work seamlessly after install. Call it unity-tiling?

- DESCRIPTION: Remote desktop solutions for desktop Linux really haven't changed a whole lot since I first started using them in the late 90s. It would be great to get something out of the box that was as responsive and feature-rich as, say, Windows's remote desktop feature. VNC is functional of course, but lacks a lot of the fluidity of other remote desktop solutions. Bonus features would include remote clipboard, sound, printers, and files.

As it stands, if I think I'm going to need to remote into a Linux desktop, I set up a Windows host and run Ubuntu in a VM. Then I use RDC/RDP to connect to the Windows host and run the VM in full screen. That's surprisingly more responsive than just running VNC in a native Ubuntu installation.

DESCRIPTION-1: I don't think it will be beneficial for Unity to have a different window system protocol from the rest of Linux desktops (including non-Unity Ubuntu flavors). I don't want X11 to stick around as the compat layer that works with both Unity and everything else. Please make Mir into a Wayland compositor.

(I like the Unity UX. I'm not a Unity hater. Currently, I'm sticking to 16.04, because I don't have confidence in Ubuntu not breaking things by making Mir have its own protocol.)

HEADLINE-2: Autoremove old kernels before /boot fills up.

DESCRIPTION-2: The UX of having to manually remove kernels with an LVM/LUKS setup (using the default /boot size the installer chooses) is bad and makes Ubuntu with disk security unsuited for non-geek users.

DESCRIPTION: An official, skinnied down, Ubuntu image for docker and AWS AMIs would be nice. I have some clients that want to maintain some uniformity across host and guest, so they aren't interested in Alpine or Busybox images. But the Ubuntu image is ~200MB or so, where OpenSuse is about half that.

I understand Canonical doesn't build those images, but you would have the expertise to help them thin it out. Some wrapper around debootstrap or similar to make a thin server image?

- DESCRIPTION: Would be nice if in enterprise environment single-sign-on (logging on with kerberos) would work out of the box :).Samba shares in nautilus are usually also slow (against windows server, between linuxes is ok) or have some other logging in problems.

Description: I would love to see Ubuntu as a serious alternative to either iOS or Android in the mobile space. The availability of phones with Ubuntu pre-installed as well as the devices[1] that support the image (for self-installation) are extremely limited. Its also not clear to me whether the project is still alive.

- DESCRIPTION: I'm using i3 for years now, just because I love the minimalism and the window tiling - I no longer see the purpose of overlapping windows. However when I install and switch i3, invariably something breaks in the inner Unity/Gnome system - the special keys stop working, the control panel needs magic invocations to bring up all the icons, etc. I would love to have the base graphical system working flawlessly even if I switch from Unity to i3. For extra points, please make i3 installed by default.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: I work for Time Out, the leading global magazine about going out!

BTW, thank you for all the hard work you and the team put in over the years!

- DESCRIPTION: I have been using Ubuntu from 10.04. One thing that makes be curse Ubuntu is when my notifications cannot be dismissed. I expected it at-least when it moved to Unity but that never happened. Although I have been living with it, this is something which catches me frequently.

- HEADLINE: Make Ubuntu Make a first class citizen and bring accompanying documentation alongside this.

- DESCRIPTION: Ubuntu Make has undergone a couple of stages, including a rename process. I would love to see maybe a graphical tool that is either stand alone or a plugin to the Software Center sorta. Maybe a "Ubuntu Make" application with a nice little icon, and it should come with basic tooling at first, but should be a resource for finding documentation on how to build SNAP packages, DEB packages, and just all out do software development for Ubuntu, whether back-end or front-end. I've seen ElementaryOS' documentation and it is nice, I would love to see Ubuntu become a great way for people new to software development and Linux to really get to dive in. Ubuntu Make has more potential than it gets credit for. I would also love to see it resolve installation issues if possible of other compilers and build tools, if there are known issues and known solutions, or some process to aid in fixing such issues that might not be so trivial to newcomers (though that's just me thinking way ahead of time). I hope it gets serious attention at some point. I've had odd issues with the D compiler (DMD) because I'm missing a package or it has to be symlinked, something a newbie would spend hours searching could be part of a simpler set of documentation for developers somewhere.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software Developer and daily Ubuntu User at work and at home.

- DESCRIPTION: I find that the default file manager is a bit dumb. There should be a mode to enable advanced features; like 'connect to server' when one can pick sftp. ftp, smb, nfs, vboxsf etc. It's fine if it's hidden in a configuration modal but 'advanced mode' should be an option.

FLAVOR - DesktopHEADLINE - If I try to "Quit" an app via the app bar more than once, please `kill -9` it (optionally, an are-you-sure dialog).DESCRIPTION - Sometimes apps lock up. Like a forever-running query just destroys my SQLDeveloper and I have to pull up a command line to kill it because the UI of the app has locked up and right-click->Quit doesn't do anything.

DESCRIPTION: Installing some version of traceroute by default may be desirable, because sometimes when you find yourself wanting traceroute, it's because you want to debug a problem that happens to prevent installing packages over the network.

If I try to run traceroute on a system with no traceroute package installed, I get a message telling me I can either install traceroute or inetutils-traceroute. It doesn't explain what the tradeoffs are. It doesn't explain why Ubuntu can't simply have one good traceroute program that does everything.

mtr can also be good, and while I usually run it in text mode, it does have an X11 version that may pull in more dependencies than some people might prefer. I've also on occasion found tcptraceroute useful, and of course sometimes a Paris traceroute is good to have. Installing more than one program that has traceroute functionality in the default installation might be appropriate.

- DESCRIPTION: What I want is for Ubuntu to partner with someone on the hardware side to provide a meaningful alternative to the macbook pro that does not suck. The OS is already fine enough if you could make it work very well with a decent laptop out of the box.I have tried Dell Sputnik...endless software pain. I have tried System76... crappy hardware.Make a Linux laptop experience that does not suck and rivals Apple for quality. That is what I want.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Director of large IT/Ops team in large scale SaaS environment

I'm tired of having to add PPA:s for when I need fresh copies of software. I've never not needed Latex, Python, pip, Gradle, etc. now for most of these apt-get works fine but not LaTeX, Gradle so for now I have a bunch of scripts that I run, for instance https://github.com/leksak/settings/blob/master/install-tex.s...

- DESCRIPTION: With the rise of JavaScript applications running on top of electron, it would be nice to have an electron package to depend on (much like Android WebView). This way not every Electron app weights over 50mb.

- HEADLINE: independent work-spaces for each monitor with multiple monitors

- DESCRIPTION: On MacOS when you maximize an application it creates it's own "workspace" and each monitor handles these independently. With GNOME 3 each additional secondary monitor is it's own workspace. These are both great but not ideal. It would be great if Unity could be more like the tiling manager i3 and have independent workspaces assigned to specific monitors. Let's say you have a laptop with two workspaces 1,2 and an external monitor with 3,4,5 then when on the laptop monitor ctrl-alt-arrow would switch between 1 and 2 only but the workspace on the external monitor would stay where it is. Then when on the external you switch only between the workspaces on that monitor.

DESCRIPTION: I'm using libinput, but my Magic Trackpad is no fun at all - thumb rejection does not work, the acceleration curve seems to be different from macOS, and the whole OS lacks kinetic scrolling. fusuma works for gestures, and should be part of Ubuntu (GNOME/Unity) IMHO. Having to use a mouse = physical pain.

I feel that I'm totally out-of-sync with the rest of open source community.The only thing that I really want is a hardware company with a strong focus on open source, basically an Apple for open source.

I want a single website w/ a shop, docs and related resources where I can consume anything from a mobile device, laptop, chromecast-like devices or anything similar.

I've spent $3000 for my last laptop and the most important thing was compatibility with open source software.

- DESCRIPTION: The cloud team is responsible for making machines available to cloud users, including making vagrant boxes. The problem is this team refuses to follow standards. For example, vagrant boxes should have the main user named "vagrant" but instead forces the user to be named "ubuntu"- and there's been a ticket open about this that's been open for a year now[1]. There have also been network bugs[2] that have been ignored for almost as long.

This is a big deal for people who use vagrant for testing. We essentially can't use the Canonical provided boxes, and this issue having been ignored for so long is not confidence inspiring.

DESCRIPTION: I am running on 16.04 so I might be missing same latest fixes. But, some applications (especially Qt application like VLC player) have the issue with HiDPI monitor. Moving app between HiDPI and non-HiDPI monitor required restart in order to get correct sizing.

- DESCRIPTION: I recently moved from Mac OS X to an Ubuntu desktop machine for day to day development. All my comments are relative to Mac OS X (I apologize cause I'm still a Mac fan boy). The only thing I really miss is the massive number of high quality apps available to me on Mac OS X. I wish Ubuntu could support Mac Apps in some sort of Mac sandbox (ala Wine for OS X). I know this is a pipe dream cause of the complexity of it but putting it out there.

A more realistic request is that you create/encourage tool makers to create Snaps. Snap packages must become compatible with flatpack to have any chance of becoming ubuitquitous. Fragmentation in Linux desktop apps will only continue hurting Linux adoption. I think the Ubuntu App directory feels too basic with too few options. Encouraging developers with better tools, better discovery and making it simple to port Mac/Windows apps to Ubuntu is the only way Ubuntu can begin to gain marketshare. I love Ubuntu but I still go back to my Mac Book PRO when I need to edit audio or have to login to many sites since I use 1Password and they have no Ubuntu app.

Ubuntu could work with the top 500 Mac App developers and help/advise them on how to easily port their Apps to Ubuntu. I'd happily pay double the price of the Mac App store Apps to have them on Ubuntu but their is no way for me to give them money. Get money to the developers and they'll come. This is missing from Ubuntu Apps.

I apologize for the long rant. I would've written a shorter comment but I didn't have the time.

DESCRIPTION: I want Ubuntu to have some strategic plan to get Photoshop and Lightroom fully working (and supported), as well as monitor-color-calibration software. We'd move my wife's photography business to Ubuntu in a heartbeat if this happened.

AFFILIATION: I provide support and guidance on computing issues for my wife's photography business.

- DESCRIPTION: Quite a few releases we had lots of new features, however they all shipped with a LOT of bugs, some small, some big - I would really love if once in a while the major focus would be to just polish the defaults to make the experience hassle free for users. Xubuntu shipped with broken color scheme or not working sound, Ubuntu Gnome almost always has some bugs that are a pain. I would love to have a release where all the desktop functionality just works and is polished without me tinkering with things.

- DESCRIPTION: Recently I tried to install ubuntu on a server class machine where it had huge amount of ram and disk storage was spread across many ssd disks. Apparently due to the size of the ram, ubuntu was attempting to set aside so much swap space that it was taking up most of the boot disk! It was very painful to change the default and i would have switched to centos if not for LXD availability. (Note that I am a programmer, not an admin and I was doing this as an experiment)

No one has been ragging on Unity.... They should be. Unity is still garbage. Ruined Ubuntu for me after about 10 years of usage... Still never returning because Unity is such a resource hog, so non-standard in its interface, and the fact that teaching someone Unity is a useless skill.

We used Ubuntu for years to teach people how to use a computer for the first time: we gave them old PC's with Ubuntu installed. Unity made this impossible. It was too slow for the old machines, too hard to figure out for the new users, and too unfriendly for experienced users to tolerate.

Hate hate hate hate Unity. Always will. Went to Mint because of it. Even installing another windowing system was a huge pain in the ass, because first, you had to install Unity and go to Synaptic and install an old Gnome. This took HOURS because Unity was so freaking SLOW!

I dunno, maybe you fixed these things, but Unity ended my relationship with Ubuntu after years of advocating for it to everyone I knew.

- DESCRIPTION: Windows 10 lets you install Ubuntu as a subsystem and use it without dual booting. In practice, we _need_ windows tools (like WebDeploy) or GUI tools (like Photoshop) at work but would much rather use Ubuntu in general. The compromise (ubuntu subsystem) works but the other way around would be much better. I'm fine with paying for Windows and also CLI tools only would still be a great start.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software developer. I also introduced a lot of people to Linux over the years for home usage.

DESCRIPTION: Contrary to some other suggestions here, I am NOT talking about f.lux / redshift or similar blue light filters here. These are supposed to make you feel sleepy, but all I want is to remove blindingly bright lights in the middle of the night. Here is the pseudo-code for how it could work:

Get some region on the screen (possibly the content of a window) convert all pixels in that region from RGB to HSL (not HSV/HSB) if average L value in the region > 0.5 { for all pixels { L = 1 - L re-render pixel } }

DESCRIPTION: Tried bluetooth sound in Ubuntu 16.04 for the first time yesterday and the sound was horrible! Apparently I need to do some configuration to get it working properly. Not needed on android. Soundblaster Jam headset.

- DESCRIPTION: Kubuntu used to be very similar to the Ubuntu distribution and now, because of the "fork", its drifting. It is also very different on configuration, packages and behavior when doing an `apt-get install kde-desktop` on an Ubuntu installation versus Kubuntu, and it should be the same.- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Research Scientist on a large Multinational

- DESCRIPTION: It would be a great way to cut costs if a single machine could support multiple workstations like SoftXpand does for Windows 7, out of the box without requiring an expert to configure. Though currently possible, it seems to be requiring a lot of configuration.

In developing countries e.g. India where I live and work, people might not come or vote and contribute for such features but this will be a huge step towards making Linux available to many more children at school and home and more hands at work. For schools, this could make computers available for a single computer making computing available for 4-8 children after installing some additional graphics cards. Being in the e-learning Industry, I see this could give a lot of momentum to computer literacy in schools.

This could be a huge maintenance and energy saver at the workplace at will. Now that almost all cards nowadays contain multi-heads, just installing an additional card could make a single computer server upto four workstations.

HEADLINE: Better support for proxy for those of us behind corporate firewalls.

DESCRIPTION:Passwords need to be kept in env variables which can leak out. Every tool does it a little different. curl, wget, chrome, firefox. I had to modify python code for apt-get to pass the proxy.

Have been admin at Uni for 30 Ubuntu workstations. All 16.04 so I don't know about 16.10 or 17.10 improvements but what's missing in Unity is polish.

- The "Ubuntu has experienced a problem" dialogue needs rework and needs to move to the tray or be queued - there should also at least be the name of the application on the modal. I've seen situations where there are more than 50 of these modals layered on top.

- There are already bugs in launchpads for Unity, please consider them and work on making the experience more smooth. Especially focus on making Window management sane with other Apps that are not always Qt/GTK, like emacs, xterms and stuff. There bugs in the menu bar, window position is often broken - lot's of small stuff like that. The launcher tends to misbehave. Would really love if Ubuntu just did a sabattical year of fixing all the bugs in the Unity UI and thinking about good design.

- Menu bar is subtle broken for a lot of apps.

- Nautilus and gvfs should take a long look at some things dolphin and KDE are doing right and adopt some ideas.

- Also stability, stability, stability. Nautilus eating 10gb of memory due to a large folder, or handling of large files is all kind of broken. This is stuff that happens daily for a lot of users and investing some time to implement sane behavoir should not be so hard. Basically I wish that the Ubuntu Desktop team torture their UI and take notes how it breaks. Opening a 10Gbyte .tar.gz, having 10.000 files in a folder, over nfs, over sshfs. Stuff like this. Needs to work without hassle and provide feedback, not hangs.

- The small stuff matters, polish. Often when something does not work no UI feedback is provided. Torture your desktop, do stupid things and see how it breaks in strange ways. Fix that!

DESCRIPTION: Support TLS server verification using TLSA DNS records protected by DNSSEC as described at http://www.internetsociety.org/articles/dane-taking-tls-auth... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na... ; this should have a smaller attack surface than the current mess of X.509 certificate authorities that are trusted by web browsers. Doing this well may require better client side DNSSEC validation; my impression is that DNSSEC validation deployments in the real world today often tend to have only the recursive resolver doing DNSSEC validation, with a potentially insecure connection between the client and the recursive resolver. Firefox probably ought to check the entire DNSSEC signature chain itself.

Currently, the setup process for creating a caching drive(I have a 16gb SSD in addition to my HDD) is very convoluted, with lots of conflicting information about how to setup bcache. Even after finally getting it working, my computer will still hang occasionally when RAM is maxed out and the cache drive has to write to HDD

- DESCRIPTION: Thanks for taking our feedback! I work in cloud services and deal with many Ubuntu 16.xx users of various skill levels. One of the most common issues that I see are folks reporting that the "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" commands fail on newly deployed cloud servers. I wouldn't really classify this as a bug, but some internal changes to the apt/apt-get commands could make things a lot smoother. Here's what happens.

1. Cloud service providers periodically make a disk image of Ubuntu 16 with the latest packages an updates.2. These images are used for several weeks (or sometimes even longer).3. When customers deploy a new Ubuntu cloud server, the disk image is copied to a new machine.4. The machine boots. Ubuntu realizes that it hasn't been booted for a while and performs some internal tasks. IIRC this is related to the "apt daily updates" service. This is the thread I always seem to reference ( http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/315502/how-to-disabl... ). The apt tasks run, which can take serveral minutes.5. Asynchronously, the cloud service reports that the server is ready.6. The customer (or their scripts) will login and do some provisioning. A common first provisioning step is to do a package update: "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade". These may fail if the "apt daily updates" task is still running. I've seen a variety of errors, but usually look like this:

When running "apt-get update" during this state, it sleeps for a few moments, then reports an apt/dpkg lock error. Since most of the time this whole process happens autonomously, it seems like making "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" block until a lock is available would be quite beneficial. Documentation on the web for upgrading ubuntu usually references these two commands, so I don't think adding new parameters would be that beneficial; changing the default behavior would be better.

- Description: mesa is moving at rapid pace and it's improving a lot. Because versions are locked you might find yourself 6-8 months behind current stable and thats MASSIVE. That's why padoka/oibaf PPAs are so popular - but only among the more tech savvy users - the rest just look at the sad state of Linux gaming..

Please put a shortcut to a terminal emulator, somewhere visible, on thedesktop of the Ubuntu LiveCD.

Whenever I have to use that disc in an emergency situation, I'm gladthat there is an icon to amazon (in case I forgot the URL of amazon),but I'm always struggling to figure out how to get to a bash prompt

I know that this is very unlikely to happen, but I wish Ubuntu had rolling releases. For me it would be okay to have a new version every 10 years (for heavy migrations like UEFI, 64 Bit, systemd). I had Ubuntu on most PCs at home, but switched most of them to Arch, as I was sick of the 6-mothly horror upgrades.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Rolling Releases

- DESCRIPTION: make a distribution which does not require any 'apt-get dist-upgrade' as 'apt-get upgrade' always brings it to the latest stable software version (like Arch and Gentoo)

- DESCRIPTION: until now I had to write a script wich runs on startup and maps my print key to the secondary menu key - this gets lost after opening my laptop from its sleep state. I want a nice GUI w/o having to write a script

DESCRIPTION: I would like to be able to use multiple monitors with various DPI in Linux without pain and suffering. Please see Mac OS X for how to get this right they did. I would like to stop worrying about which of my monitors are plugged in at boot, I'd like to be able to plug them in whenever I need to. I'd like to be able to smoothly move a window from one screen to another without the window becoming impossibly small or overly large.

ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software and Electronics Engineer trying to do his job(s) using Ubuntu.

- DESCRIPTION: I know this is an issue on a grander scale, but as we all know hibernation isn't possible when you have your whole disk encrypted. If this can be fixed that would be great, or at least remove the option to hibernate then.

DESCRIPTION: Sometimes the distribution version of a package is broken and the problem is marked WONTFIX because it involves a version bump, even in the case where it is not a library or the version bump is only there to fix a typo in a config file. This is extremely frustrating for end users when they learn that mplayer will never have GUI support in any version of Ubuntu 14 or there will never be manpages for zsh. If something is a bug and there is no reasonable chance that another package depends on the buggy behavior, allow the package to be fixed.

- HEADLINE: Under "open with other application" menu, add option of "Set As Default Application"

- DESCRIPTION: Right now we have a not so friendly method to make some application as a default application while opening a certain type of file. For example, I want every text file to be opened in Atom and not in Sublime, I usually have to go to properties> change the default app. Could we make it a bit simpler by introducing the option right in the window - "open with other application"? Right now, there are only two options - "View All Application" and "Find new application".It would also be worthwhile to keep it in the right-click menu window.

DESCRIPTION: I know this sounds like a nutcacke request, but Ubuntu has missed the opportunity of creating viable systemd competition. This is easier than writing an alternate display server. We are stuck with systemd monoculture which increases complexity and causes breakage for no good reason. There are other well tought init systems like openrc or runit.

Description: Allow user-published pre-configurations to be published on Ubuntu.com. Then allow me to review and apply the entire thing or fragments to my fresh Ubuntu install. I should have an XPS M1330 install that just gives me the stuff for my computer.

- DESCRIPTION: I recently got my first ultrabook. I used Windows on it for the first few weeks before installing Ubuntu. The touchpad gestures were very useful for certain activities such as minimizing/maximizing and switching between windows. It seems that Ubuntu has a very limited set of gestures, and after a couple months I still feel like my productivity is held back due to the relative difficulty of switching among windows.

- DESCRIPTION: How many year has it been that we need to have correct performance management / drivers enabled to correctly use quicksync with discrete GPU's, for how long will we need to tune cpu behavior / peripherals power management ourselves to have decent power usage? A "I'm the system, I know what I need" one button optimization would be really appreciated...

- DESCRIPTION: command line is good to give commands sequences, like "do this and do that and also more", and it works only if you already know the commands. Command line is really bad to configure stuff, which is the act of telling the computer how to do stuff. It is also the worst thing ever when it comes to exploring and finding commands and configurations.Some people argue that the cli is faster but the saved time is not always worth the brain power or the pleasure to get stuff done "slower" but intuitively with a GUI. Also the time spent to learn a certain command rarely matches the time saved using it. It is much more difficult to screw stuff up using a GUI, because you can go back with a simple click, while a command to go back rarely matches the one that put you forward toward something you didn't want.

A general rule for good software is "don't hide functionality". If you are putting a lot of important stuff behind a command line, you are hiding stuff, even if you can ask for a command list.

Since Ubuntu, for what I understand, wants to be an OS for a wider audience, I hope you will consider doing putting a lot of effort in improving the UI and UX of the OS, and a good, complete GUI are a great way to start.

My hopes are that if a user searches "how to do X in ubuntu", he won't get just a list of commands, but also a step by step guide. Just like it happens on windows.

This is an UX mess, as it's too easy to mistype for another key (like W or 1) and ending up closing the program we're currently in. This destructive action already has a standard way (Alt+F4), which is way harder to mistype. Destructive actions shouldn't be as easy to do.

---

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Add Flux/Redshift natively

As iOS/macOS is adding a light filter for the night, this feature will be more and more common natively in OSs, why not add it to Ubuntu now?

Description: ZFS On Linux is poorly integrated mess through the SPL. Memory management is an active detractor from performance, stability, and operations. It's unlikely that it's ever going to be "native" on Linux. Even more unlikely is its integration into upstream.

Unfortunately, ZoL, unlike other out of tree additions Canonical has added, such as proprietary drivers and codecs, ZoL has real alternatives, like BtrFS, and BCacheFS. I think it would make more sense to throw your weight behind these projects where there will be long term benefit to the community as opposed to short term benefit to y'all.

Whoever seems to be singing the praises of ZFS on Linux hasn't put it through its paces in modern, multi-tenant container workloads. It requires active awareness of its existence unlike ZFS, and EXT4. To me, this is a fundamental regression.

Do not fall privy to the sunk cost fallacy, instead continue to actively weigh your choices, and as soon as the opportunity cost for !ZoL or !SPL becomes reasonable, jump.

DESCRIPTION: There are many old and/or bad applications in the official Ubuntu repos. Prune aggressively. Anything that hasn't been updated for several years could be flagged for human review. Anything that people use will get PPAs made for them in time. Anything that's dead doesn't deserve to be in universe or multiverse.

DESCRIPTION: The default backup app has bugs. The first time it worked! Then after a software update it stopped working. I stopped using it. You can't just ship buggy backup software :| Maybe there needs to be a better one. Or add more testing to make sure critical / default packages like this don't break on update.

Once upon a time I used to use ndiswrapper + cabextract to get windows drivers to work in Linux for "most cards." That was cool. Today it's much harder when hardware isn't supported. I wish there was still a way to use OSX drivers or windows drivers for things I have no hope of getting *nix support for...

Unity with native tiling manager features that can organise windows automatically like XMonad, i3, Amethyst, etc. But not replace Unity as window manager.

I adore Amethyst automatic tiling in macOS, especially on a 34" ultrawide screen. I used to use Compiz Grid in Ubuntu to manually layout my windows but that was a chore. Then I tried X Tile which was limited, poor UX and poor support for multiple monitors.

XMonad, i3 and others mean replacing Unity all together which I do not want, I just would prefer built in window organisation in Unity. Supporting Xmonad and Amethyst's shortcut keys would be nice for muscle memory.

- DESCRIPTION: Please, please keep package and paths compatibility with Debian. The amount of work to get Debian packages work on a recent Ubuntu distribution is huge, and there are a lot of scientific software that is geared to Debian, not Ubuntu.

DESCRIPTION: Googling up an issue usually produces results for Lemurs and such. AskUbuntu is a step in the right direction, but it needs some (more?) employees committed to improving it. Doing so would create a virtuous cycle where there is an incentive to improve documentation in order to reduce costs (maybe by reducing the relevance of cruft).

It's o.k. if the starting point is sometimes RTM because at least it is a starting point and following up on the resultant "huh?"s would also align cost incentives toward removing the rough edges.

HEADLINE: Get out and walk around.

DESCRIPTION: This audience is more likely to be inside the Linux bubble than the people who really need improvements. Most people don't care that much about battery performance and that's why they are happy with cheap laptops and desktops. Most people don't care about 4k screens and that's why they buy cheap laptops and monitors. Most people don't care about Wayland v X11 or lightDM v whatever.

- HEADLINE: Stop releasing every six months. Instead, have an LTS, like you already do, and then a rolling release that is conservative and battle-tested, like Gentoo does.

To help with the rolling release, create an infrastructure that allows you to progressively release updates that could cause problems to some users (like an evdev -> libinput or a GNOME 3.22 -> 3.24 transition)

DESCRIPTION: every time I update Ubuntu I cross fingers for havings things that work not broken, like Guake on more monitors and other bugs. Ubuntu is so much prone to regression bugs. Maybe more tests would be useful?

HEADING: the Unity menu ui is bad designed

DESCRIPTION: Apart from the apps search feature which works well, the apps navigation is so ugly: giant icons, I have a 2k monitor and I see just 30 apps when I go on the apps list!!! WTF!!! I have to scroll this giant icons menu also beacuse the app list isn't resizable or fullscreenable! Those giant icons drive me mad, no joke!

FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop (on laptops)

HEADING: Fix long-stanging WiFi issues

DESCRIPTION: there are a lot of bugs related to WiFi on laptops. I had the Power Management: Off one: http://askubuntu.com/a/537375/53268 but there are many others. I've always experienced bad stuff

DESCRIPTION: Several places where the default behavior of vmbuilder could possibly be improved, relative to what seems to happen on 14.04 / 16.04:

I've found that I always end up wanting --addpkg acpid when running vmbuilder so that the host can send the guest a request to shut down cleanly; maybe include this package by default unless it is somehow explicitly deselected?

I have developed a habit of always using --addpkg linux-image-virtual because at one point I ran into problems when not using it; if it is still needed, it should probably be included by default.

I've ended up with VMs in a directory where I didn't intend to have them when not specifying the -d flag; perhaps it would be better if vmbuilder would refuse to run without a -d flag explicitly specifying the directory. (Trying to identify all of the options one needs the first time running vmbuilder can be overwhelming, leading to leaving some options out and then ending up with a suboptimal VM, and sometimes one doesn't want to start over and rebuild the VM with the correct options.)

It might also be desirable to make the --timezone option mandatory; I think the default behavior is to put the guest in GMT rather than having it inherit the host's timezone, which can be surprising, especially if the host's timezone had initially been autodetected by the installer.

- DESCRIPTION: Profile Linux daemons and Ubuntu services which run full time. Fix performance issues from biggest to smallest. Reduce memory footprint for all services across the board, making it much nicer for those of us with 4GB laptops.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Developer who uses KDE Neon at work and Xubuntu at home.

HEADLINE: Make Wi-fi less aggressive about switching bands, and prefer 5ghz

DESCRIPTION:For access points with 2 and 5ghz bands which are both weak my laptop will continually jump between them every few seconds. This makes for very poor connectivity, and if it just stuck with the 5ghz it would do fine.

If it preferred a 5ghz signal that would do wonders for connectivity too.

DESCRIPTION: A turnkey (easy GUI setup) that uses virtual GPU support in driver to partition the GPU into multiple devices (or just two) where one can be shared with a Linux or Windows VM, on Windows this would allow dGPU (almost native DirectX 11 gaming) with only one graphics card (as well as on laptops). This would allow alot of Windows users to switch to Ubuntu as their main OS and only start a VM to use their privacy invading Win desktops to play games. Fedora is discussing something like this.

See this for more info. I realize proper vGPU support at the lower levels is a ways away, but so is 17.10 and 18.04 ;-)

DESCRIPTION: The cli installer inherited from Debian needs to be modernized. It is ugly, asks too many questions and has some weird behavior, for example when not configuring a network connection at installation, only a cdrom apt mirror is added (even when there's no cdrom drive).

- Stop trying to emulate Apple UI. I use Ubuntu in part because I don't like Apple's UI.

- Better HiDPI support. Ubuntu takes a LOT of tweaking to look good on a HiDPI screen.

- Better support for common VPN configurations. In particular, L2TP/IPSec-PSK should be an option out of the box because it's an exceedingly common configuration.

- Make input methods enabled and working by default. If I install Ubuntu in Chinese, I should have a working IME on the FIRST boot-up. As of now, I have to go googling and apt-getting and doing lots of weird things before I can type in Chinese on a new system.

- Get with the beat on machine learning tools. The latest releases of OpenCV, Tensorflow, and so on should be in the Ubuntu repositories, and updated on a regular basis. Ubuntu was originally "Debian with a better release schedule", but it no longer is.

- Things like gnome-tweak-tool should be included by default if they are the only way to change the GTK2 theme.

- Better documentation about how to do things from the command line. Like how to start/stop Wi-Fi, select sound devices, and so on. Googling results in a mess of advice about pactl, pacmd, alsa, and I never know what is the "correct" way to do things from the command line for the current release of Ubuntu. Can you have a "before vs. after" table of commands? For example, include this:

- Stop arbitrarily moving stuff around on the UI -- moving the min/max/buttons from the right to left, and so on. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

- Most Ubuntu users are developers. Build for developers. Unity is basically unusable. Put some serious thought into Cinnamon or MATE as a default UI. Listen to your customers.

- Bring back and revive compiz. It was Linux's only hope of looking good. Also, being able to just press a key and draw on the screen, or arbitrarily zoom parts of the screen, was simply awesome for meetings and presentations.

- HEADLINE: Please make system settings more accessible and consistent

- DESCRIPTION: I understand that system UI has been a bit volatile in recent years. The GUI has looked different almost every time I've installed a new Ubuntu, and when a big overhaul happens, it takes some time to flesh out all the stuff on the periphery. This sort of thing is unacceptable, however: https://twitter.com/Zikes/status/829882331959795712

I'm a bit of a "power user" yet I struggled to accomplish something as basic as adjusting my mouse pointer speed. It's just those sorts of oversights that prevent me from being able to recommend Linux to family and friends.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: Working HD Active Protection System for newer Thinkpads- DESCRIPTION: Around the time of the release of the Thinkpad W530, Lenovo had changed the way in which the HDAPS system was done on Thinkpads. In the past, the tp-smapi* packages and the hdapsd daemon made using Thinkpads with rotating platters excellent, but the newer models now receive errors, and there's some notion that maybe the kernel has some kind of support for APS systems now. It's quite frustrating to know I've sacrificed protection by having a newer model while we wait for SSDs to become as trustworthy as our HDDs.- No Affiliation

- DESCRIPTION: As far as I can tell, you can drag/drop items to the launcher, and rearrange the buttons on the launcher, but changing the icon (or setting one at all) and getting the launcher to actually launch the thing you want is unnecessarily difficult, requiring .desktop file edits that I can never seem to get to work anyway. I still have to run /home/myname/eclipse/eclipse from a terminal on one of my machines because the launcher is not working/non-intuitive and I don't have the time/desire to stop what I'm doing and figure it out.

Also, expandable/group launchers (many apps under one launcher square/icon spreading into multiple items) would be nice.

Currently, the upgrade (as in do-release-upgrade) process takes long, very long if not on an SSD. In my experience, apps can crash during the upgrade. During a recent upgrade I did on a family member's machine, the machine was sent to sleep and the screenlocker crashed afterwards. After powering off the machine, the X session wouldn't come up anymore, I had to complete the upgrade manually on the command line. This was all on Kubuntu, but I don't expect the mechanism to be radically different in the standard flavor, it still puts the machine in a dangerous state.

- DESCRIPTION: While Ubuntu users have the Dash, we Xubuntu'ers (and I assume the same goes for Lubuntu users, and others) would love to have something similar an `apt install` away, or even --god help me-- installed by default.

Options seem to be abundant, but few of them are truly lightweight and/or easy to get running and/or provide the relevant results that you'd normally expect. I think I've tried pretty much all of them, but after a day or two I always end up going back to Catfish.

Better thermal management - Thermald should become the default, but it needs many improvements.

Zombie processes in containers - When somebody causes a Zombie in a lxd container which happens from time to time you have to reboot the machine, this should not be necessary

Mounting remote filesystems in containers - Fuse is possible if you allow it, but mounting SMB, NFS require a kernel module and cannot be mounted in a lxd container, so make fuse-smb or fuse-nfs.

DNS in Openstack - DNS in openstack is currently really painful to setup correctly. Create a new default module which lets you configure a subdomain for the cluster, a subdomain which is the projectname and then after you start an instance you should be able to simply ssh user@instancename.projectname.clustername.tld

DESCRIPTION: When a zero day like heartbleed comes out I want the operating system to give me the option to immediately disconnect from the internet, or even power down the OS. I also want the ability to call these commands myself so that if I have a wider scanner, like Appcanary, I can trigger the shutdown command myself.

I want this command to get called anytime there is a reasonable (>10% chance) that the server could give out shell level access through nothing more than normal internet traffic, and I want the OS to take care of it.

Ubuntu is awesome because it doesn't make me learn stuff unless I want to learn them. The defaults are sensible and configuration is usually pretty easy. I'd like security to be as easy as this.

DESCRIPTION: I was excited to upgrade to Yakkety on my home server, because it has Syncthing (I'd rather not use their 3rd party deb), only to find out that it's too old to be compatible with my phone (they're still in the rapid change phase). Would be great if it were all compatible. Not too much in your control, just try to be as up-to-date as you can at the point of release. I know you can't upgrade mid-release.

As for sound, on Trusty, I had issues with HDMI. On Yakkety those issues went away but now I have worse issues. I use my server with Music Player Daemon. I have a headphone cord for now so it's okay, but I'd rather use HDMI and get the full benefit of my flac files.

I've been using Ubuntu Desktop for over 5 years and Linux for more than 15 years. I keep on changing distros, but Ubuntu is my first choice.

Role: Web developer

Please make it easier for Moms/Dads to use Ubuntu. My parents (both above 60) use Ubuntu and they love it. But I can feel their frustration sometimes when they need to do more. They mostly use Firefox (YouTube, Facebook) etc. so its fine. But when they need some more power usage, like transferring photos from camera they are stuck. Using a webcam, no way.

Upgrading software, yikes!

I seriously believe Ubuntu Desktop is doing a fantastic job of making sure Linux rules the desktop. If not now, it will soon. I'm sorry I can't provide any substantial issues, but I hope the UX team at Ubuntu can do a good job.

DESCRIPTION: When I install a new server that should have a static IP address on a network that has a DHCP server, it would be nice if the installer would give me the option to configure the static IP address, instead of it initially getting a DHCP lease and then needing to have the static IP address configured by editing /etc/network/interfaces after booting off the hard drive.

Loving Ubuntu myself, I would like a system not requiring command line stuff for fixing things, so everyone could use and maintain it, not just experts (e.g. a "fix my computer" button that in worst case it could reinstall everything but the home folders).

DESCRIPTION: I have a thinkpad. It has 2 built in mice like HIDs (the rubber knob "touchpoint" and a touchpad) plus I have a trackball for the office and tiny bluetooth mouse to travel. In order to set the prefs on sensitivity and acceleration for all these devices I need to do some fuzzing with xinput in the profile. Just recently, xinput changed and broke my prefs. I would love if ubuntu made it easy to just plug in a mouse, make some changes to the sensitivity, and not overwrite your touchpoint / other mice settings in the process

- DESCRIPTION: When an application in the dash has open a lot of windows (for me, Terminal) the height of the right click menu eventually will not fit the screen. It cannot be scrolled so it is essentially impossible to find the correct window by right clicking on the application. See a screen shot of the problem at https://www.stdin.xyz/downloads/people/longsleep/stash/ubunt... - these are around 40 terminals at 1440 pixel height with scale 1.

FLAVOR: DesktopHEADLINE: Make Unity menu and search blazing fast.DESCRIPTION: I hate pressing the menu keybind and waiting what seems forever when I just want to start a calculator. The search bar should be/feel fast, like Mac's Spotlight.

Flavor: Ubuntu Desktop; perhaps serverHeadline: Organize bash startup files like run-parts (but sourced)Description: See https://github.com/wd5gnr/bashrc -- basically .bashrc just sources stuff out of .bash.d. Extra points if you do like the link and allow for user-specific and machine-specific and even os-specific files. This allows you to keep one set of bash startups maintained (e.g., under git) for all your logins. Extra bonus points if you have a smarter way to sync across boxes than the link does.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: Better palm detection for trackpads- DESCRIPTION: With the caveat that I realize that you need to support many brands of laptop with different trackpad drivers, this is one of my major pains when using a linux (Ubuntu) laptop vs anything else: after hours and hours (and hours) of googling and struggling, I can still not manage to get reasonable palm detection going on my work laptop (Dell XPS 15). When coding, probably once every 10 minutes my palm is mis-interpreted as a finger swipe and my cursor jumps into some unrelated code. ROLE/AFFILIATION: linux software dev, federal gov't

DESCRIPTION: While these apps currently work on Wayland, they rely on X-wayland to do so. Running native Wayland versions of these apps would provide a better experience while reducing dependencies on X.

The current theme looks very old fashioned, especially compared to the new theme (partially) in use under unity8. I think something more flat and less realistic could work well. The current suru/unity8 design seems to go in this direction, so it would be nice to have something similar on unity7 too.

Flavour: Ubuntu Desktop

2. Make unity8 more user customizable.

I would like that unity8 could be heavily configurable, so that every user could have his/her desktop customised accordingly to own preferences. I mean things like moving the panel and the bar to other places of the screen, changing the background color of the panels and so on.

DESCRIPTION: https://www.as112.net/ describes a largely uncoordinated system for providing somewhat localized servers to handle certain DNS zones. It seems to me that something somewhat similar could work for anycasting mirrors of major free software distributions. I suspect that public peering point operators and ISPs might be most likely to participate if a single server could act as a mirror for Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, etc. It would be best if the clients were set up to fetch a list of packages and their checksums from the centralized servers operated by the distribution maintainers, and then would try to fetch the packages from the local uncoordinated mirror, and if the local uncoordinated mirror either doesn't have the file or has the file with a bad checksum, would fall back to fetching the file from the official centralized server.

DESCRIPTION: I use Ubunut Core on my laptop. Wifi generally works fine. I don't use network-manager or any GUI tools for managing networks, I just edit wpa_supplicant.conf directly. This works fine, but often after my machine has been idle for a long time the wifi link just goes down. A simple restart of the networking service fixes this. I assume that something is crashing or hanging, but I haven't looked into it in detail. It would be nice if this sort of thing was detected and the service restarted automatically, or this just didn't happen to being with.

- DESCRIPTION: When I have an app running on another workspace and I click on its icon it takes me to that other workspace so I have to then switch back to previous workspace and then expose and move window to current workspace. I'd rather right click the app and just have an option to "move to current workspace". Also related , clicking the current active focused apps launcher icon should minimize it.

- DESCRIPTION: Realistically, I'm going to be installing Ubuntu Desktop on a modern commodity machine that previously had Windows installed. This will mean there's an existing UEFI partition that the installer should be able to take care of / co-opt / replace. It doesn't. The tools necessary for editing EFI records aren't on the installer desktop out of the box. Sorting this out myself becomes a colossal time-wasting pain.

- DESCRIPTION: using ZFS + LUKS as my root filesystem in Ubuntu now all over (the cloud, my laptop, etc). It would be great if this were built-in as an option in the Ubuntu installers. It would be even cooler if canonical helped push some cutting edge ZFS on Linux 0.7.0 features out there: native encryption and resumable send/recv for example. I know there are licensing issues involved, but this is my wish :)

Clear, "simple" control of the network stack and connectivity. The ability to start up totally off-line until manually establishing the desired connection. Network connectivity that can be made dependent upon having a working VPN connection up, and that dies completely upon failure of that connection. Everything can clearly be made to go through the VPN connection, DNS, etc. IPv6 can be turned off if needed (e.g. for Comcast). A single, if widget-filled and "busy", dialog box for managing this connectivity.

I realize a lot of this isn't strictly under Ubuntu's purview, but you said "anything".

I want not just to manually manage my own connectivity, at the terminal (and even then, the "die completely upon VPN failure" is not straightforward"), but for my family members, etc., to be able to do so, themselves.

HEADLINE: Allow rollback/snapshot of any change of system settings or package installs/purges

DESCRIPTION: It would be great if Ubuntu had an undo mechanism for any operation that changes the system settings, or the installed packages. Also, being able to snapshot system directories like /etc, /usr and /var would be great. Perhaps this can be implemented by running Ubuntu on top of a snapshotting filesystem like Btrfs. Of course, in that case, any system tools should be able to deal properly with background changes of the filesystem.

DESCRIPTION: Some small flaws never seem to be fixed or addressed. Like sound output selection. If I connect a HDMI cable, and previously have selected it as the audio output, I probably would like it to be automatically selected again.

On my XPS15, after disconnecting the headphone connector I can no longer get audio out from any output. Even if I reconnect the headphones.

Why do I have to select headphone type when it is connected?Why isnt it detected? Why isn't the previous answer select the next time a 3.5mm connector is connected?

- DESCRIPTION: The user should be able to 1) drag any executable to the dock to make a new launcher 2) Right click any launcher to be able to choose a dialog to customize command line arguments, initial working directory, and icon.The user should not have to edit a desktop item file or install or know about Alacarte. Windows got this one right.

The HWE stacks y'all have been rolling out for LTS are really awesome. We're big fans.

Unfortunately, another component of Ubuntu is detracting from their awesomeness. Systemd isn't updated, and unfortunately it's becoming tightly coupled to the kernel and making certain kernel capabilities available like file system features, and networking. It would be great if systemd was included in the HWE.

DESCRIPTION: 1) personal firewall. (ala sygate, little snitch, kerio personal firewall, etc). This is essential (and shame on ALL OS vendors for not supplying one) as it is insane that apps can just willy, nilly go where ever and when ever they want. This is the very cornerstone of insecurity (malware, hacking). For every connection I want to see an interactive popup (with IP address, app name, etc) with the options (allow, deny, make permissions permanent).

2) HIPS (host instrusion protection) firewall, the exact same thing as #1, but for apps, not internet. If an app is starting or calling another app (or link library (DLL)) I want to know about it and stop it before it runs.

3) App sandbox that provides virtual filesystem, etc for any app I want to run but want to refuse it direct access to system files, etc.

===I tried Douane (linux personal firewall) but failed at making it run because there are no binaries provided and it didn't compile correctly and I don't have the time to debug it. So at least provide this in binary form from the unbuntu respositories.

1.FLAVOR: desktopHEADLINE: better installer - I'm not talking about the UI. DESCRIPTION: The Ubuntu installer is just refusing to deal with UEFI, smartboot, NVME, Raid and the various combos thereof. Please look at /r/dell or anywhere people are talking about XPS - which has the newer NVME ssd in raid mode (set in the bios). Ubuntu's installers are just not able to deal with this in a smart way. Yes I can potentially figure that out... or use Fedora, whose installer actually showed me a disk (Ubuntu 16.04 did not even indicate a disk present).

2. Flavor: desktopHEADLINE: First class support for Gnome DESCRIPTION: yes, I know you guys do Unity. But Gnome + Wayland is kind of a standard as well... and a lot of other distros use this combo. I'm not asking you to move away from Unity, but atleast let Gnome+wayland have first class community support.

3. Flavor: Desktop, server, coreHEADLINE: Better display defaults for apt. DESCRIPTION:I have to set "Aptitude::UI::Package-Display-Format "%c->%a%M %p #%v%V";" to get a reasonable display of information in apt. Could you please do something about this ?

4. Flavor: DesktopHEADLINE: Suspend on low powerDESCRIPTION: Yes, I have heard every variation of argument here. I have participated in all the bugs. Here's my POV: until Linux as a whole can give me out-of-the-box hibernate support, for god's sake give me suspend on low power. This is insane - it is 2017. I should not be losing work when I can just close my lid, suspend and rush to the nearest outlet.

- HEADLINE: Simpler install customization and actual canonical (lol) guides for how to do certain tasks

- DESCRIPTION: Customizing/automating install images is a pain. I've spent years working on making the debian/Ubuntu installer do just the things it was designed to do (e.g. preseeding) and it still feels like I have to cobble together information from ten different resources and read through the installer code to figure out how things are supposed to work.

I would love a simple way to understand and customize the installer. A canonical list of preseed options would be great. A clear guide to building and integrating custom udeb packages would be great. Some way of hooking in with Python or shell scripts where the Ubuntu installer can handle them intelligently (putting them in /scripts/{pre,post}_install.d/ rather than specifying a single command in early_command/late_command which then runs x more scripts) (and better functionality for handling this via netboot), information on how to specify a custom list of installer packages to load or integrate, a clear guide on how to take an Ubuntu server ISO and remove any packages I don't need, scripts to rebuild the package list more easily, a simple guide on how to run the installer via NBD or NFS.

All of these things are possible and there are guides for them all over the place, but I've yet to find a single, simple "system builder's guide" which will tell me, an admin, how to do the various levels of customization which are already possible and supported.

- DESCRIPTION: as juju and lxc/lxd are already available as a snap package, it would be awesome to be able to deploy maas as multiple snaps using plugs and slots allowing enterprises to deploy it quickly through custom ubuntu core images.

This would be useful in a production environment but also in case of emergency plan as it would allow a quick datacenter restore right from an admin laptop and a SDCard.

- FLAVOR: [Ubuntu Core]

- HEADLINE: basement for all other flavors

- DESCRIPTION: Ubuntu Core is the most interesting idea (along with juju, maas, lxc/lxd and snaps) the canonical bring since ubuntu itself, please use this distribution design as a basement for any other ubuntu flavor.

I know its a loooot of work as you would have to snap package every single service/tool/other available on the ubuntu repository, but its absolutely needed.

CoreOS have started this philosophy of immutable, safely updatable and reliable distribution, but Ubuntu as the potential to push it way further with ubuntu core.

Ubuntu Core need this step to become a defacto solution for enterprise. Now a day, enterprises tend to use CoreOS because theyve made a clear statement of how they will support this philosophy on a long term.

If you want to get enterprise customers back to you canonical, please strongly support ubuntu core! Using it as a basement for all other flavors would be a strong statement in that way ;-)

- DESCRIPTION: I very much got used to quickly navigating menus by icon - right click in nautilus and open in terminal had an icon next to it etc. I had to turn this on via a gconf setting or something, I forget, but now that possibility is gone, and I'm left with hundreds of moments of tiny frustration not being able to find what I'm looking for quite as quickly.

- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: Better DisplayPort Multi Stream Transport support

- DESCRIPTION: This is related to others' comments about better external monitor support in general. I had an MST hub that worked in 16.04 but doesn't in 16.10. I don't know what happened. But even when it did work (and I've tried three different ones, so it's not just this one that's flaky), I had to say the right incantations and hotplug things in the right order, and make sure I'd rebooted since last using only a single external monitor, etc, in order to avoid hard crashes or blank screens. And I'm faced with having to wait multiple cycles thirty seconds long while the monitors, the hub, and the computer seemingly can't coordinate with each other and switch on and off repeatedly. I'm on a dell xps 13 (intel graphics). Yes, this belongs in a bug report and I'll do that too, but I wanted to draw attention to it anyway. I've struggled with flaky MST support regardless and am pretty sure it's not limited to my hardware.

- DESCRIPTION: I still use Ubuntu Unity because of the superior UX of app indicators, which GNOME refused to merge many years ago and still sucks to this day for it. However, one thing I miss a lot from GNOME is the far snappier application search/launcher.

The Unity Dash has some pretty poor ergonomics overall compared to GNOME's "Activities", but that is not what I'm concerned about right now. All I want is for the process of (1) pressing Super (or the "Windows key"); (2) searching for an application; and (3) launching the application I searched for to go at least as fast as it does in GNOME 3. Right now I use the crash-prone Synapse[0] instead of the Dash.

You might be wondering: "But isn't it really just as fast?" First of all, no, sometimes the Dash itself opens really slowly for no apparent reason; and second, strictly speaking, it's not the speed of opening an application that is problematic; it's the slow feedback loop of getting search results as you type. This feedback is instantaneous in Synapse, near-instantaneous in GNOME Shell, and comparatively slow as heck in Unity Dash. Disabling the extra features in the Dash helps a bit.

It's also very annoying that it doesn't automatically highlight the first search result (as it does in GNOME), which makes it ambiguous as to what will happen when you press Enter.

And it is awful that in order to select any search result after the first, I either have to: (1) keep typing to narrow the search down further; or (2) move my hand all the way over to the arrow keys, or worse, the mouse.

Pressing TAB doesn't cycle through the search results, it cycles through: (1) the "Applications" UI header; (2) the first result of the "Files & Folders" section (instead of the header -- why the inconsistency?); (3) the "Filter results" button.

I know Unity 8 is the priority these days; even if the Unity 7 Dash can't be fixed, I sure hope Unity 8 doesn't make the same silly UX mistakes.

FLAVOR: Ubuntu DesktopHEADLINE: I just want simple things to workDESCRIPTION:- after an update cups is broken- can I have 3 monitors without jerking around with vi?- battery performance sucks- random waking up of my laptop after suspending it- one needs a degree to enable bluetooth- after 10y of various linux distros I'm considering switching to Windows for my primary dev envROLE: Freelance full stack engineer

DESCRIPTION: https://gcc.gnu.org/extensions.html mentions bounds checking patches for gcc. Get these patches updated to work correctly with the current version of gcc, and get most of the Ubuntu userland compiled with bounds checking enabled (and then gradually work on making more and more of the userland compatible with bounds checking, and also extend it to the kernel). I suspect paying for this development work would be cheaper than paying out a $10,000 bug bounty every time someone finds a bug that could have been rendered irrelevant by bounds checking support.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: No Suggestion to download the apps from Store- DESCRIPTION: Nowadays ads are everywhere, from your 'explorer' to 'dashboard'. Why can;t we have an option where we can disabled the 'suggested app' feature in the app launcher.- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Just a design student. I can design interfaces/menus/options to turn on-off, basically a switch with a good UX

FLAVOR: Server, CoreHEADLINE: Snaps are too hard to makeROLE: DevOps, release, infrastructure engineerDESCRIPTION: In fact they are so hard and convoluted to make that I always fall back on just comiling and packaging everything inside a Vagrant VM or a Docker container and then just generating a tar or deb with FPM. You guys really need to simplify the process if you want software to be delivered through snaps.

- DESCRIPTION: Mir and Unity 8 enabled by default with a strong push for snaps and/or flatpaks (or at least don't make it hard for users to use flatpaks on Ubuntu).If Mir and Unity 8 aren't default in 17.10, then I don't think there's much of a chance it will be in 18.04, and that would truly suck. We've been waiting for it for a long time.

HEADLINE: Allow monitor modelines to be manually added using the control panel

DESCRIPTION: When autodetection fails (running through a KVM for example) it is difficult to add the correct modelines for the monitor. Add an advanced menu to the configuration that allows the user to easily specify what modes are available. Since most people are on flat panel displays you can use generic values for the timings.

DESCRIPTION: It would be useful to be able to open a terminal from any direcrory of Nautilus and the terminal would point to the same directory immediatelly. I know Nautilus is a Gnome development but thought it would worth to ask for this. I find it hard to open a terminal each time when I'm a middle od something and cd t the directory manually.

DESCRIPTION: 16.04 LTS shipped with a cacti package of a version written for PHP 5, but shipped PHP 7, and Ubuntu's effort to patch cacti for PHP 7 compatibility was incomplete. When I reported a bug with using more frequently than once a minute polling resulting from this, I got a response that seemed to indicate that Ubuntu was in no hurry to fix it. I ended up simply switching from Ubuntu to CentOS with the epel repository, which avoided both the bug I did report, and some other buggy behavior that I suspect may have a similar PHP version incompatibility root cause that I have not wasted the time to track down.

FLAVOUR: (I'm British) Ubuntu DesktopHEADLINE: Less glossiness on Unity launcherDESCRIPTION: I use a flat theme (Paper and Arc) to make my desktop less obtrusive when I'm writing/coding. Unity has loads of glossy effects on the launcher, which is distracting. I'd prefer something modern, flat and out-of-the-way.ROLE/AFFILLIATION: Sr. Software Engineer, B2C Food company.

- DESCRIPTION: every other time I alt-tab I am baffled by what window gets focus. I have to actually think to use this feature. Compiz is no better. OSX has this done right. Another somewhat related problem is sometimes a window is not raised when expected but I'm not sure when exactly that happens. Something like "if an app is already open and you try to launch it" but more subtle than that.

---

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Universal Ctrl+W command to close windows or tabs

- DESCRIPTION: Somerhing I took for granted on OSX that I thought was coming from Linux, but apparently not. Yes, you could remap the close shortcut from Alt+F4 to Ctrl+W but that closes the window in browsers instead of closing the tab. And some apps don't react to this key binding at all.

Another thing I miss dearly is a universal shortcut to open an app's settings (Cmd+,) in OSX.

---

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Broken Apps in App Center

- DESCRIPTION: Even apps that are featured (on 16.04 which is latest LTS) like Maps have tons on 1-star ratings because their core features are broken. I installed myself to verify. That's just embarassing compared to other app stores.

- DESCRIPTION: VR isn't just for games. And using VR for productivity is a no-brainer. Ubuntu should be the go-to operating system for the most immersive VR desktop experience. Ubuntu should lead the VR-on-the-desktop revolution by supporting desktop VR (by working with Steam/FBOculus/MS/Google/Samsung as necessary to get the hardware and drivers correct and plug-n-play).

I've given up using my bt headphones. You need to reconnect a bunch of times to even be able to select a2dp mode instead of headset. If I try and direct audio from a web browser to the a2dp sink via pulse, it stalls the rendering thread and videos won't play at all. They start working again as soon as I switch the sink.

This has been happening to me across multiple computers running Ubuntu for years. Even on a fairly current one, the Intel NUC5i7RYH, I'll be doing really trivial stuff and the entire system just hangs.

Like, I pick up an icon in nautilus and the system hangs before I've even given it an instruction. 10 seconds later, the window ungreys and I can do stuff like move the file.

Or I might click and hold on an email in Evolution to move it to a folder, and evolution entirely hangs for a long time before it lets me complete the action.

It's really weird, and has been with me over two different computers and at least 4 years worth of Ubuntu distributions. I feel like I'm crazy and the only person who this seems to affect, because no one else ever seems to know what I'm talking about.

Even weirder to me is that this never happened on older versions, on older hardware, yet no one else seems to have an issue. It's super frustrating.

FLAVOR: Ubuntu ServerHEADLINE: Continue supporting systemd alternativesDESCRIPTION: Systemd is problematic in a number of ways for a number of environments. Please at least continue to support Upstart; I'll admit it isn't my favorite init, but is far less trouble in some contexts.ROLE: Devops Engineer, not speaking for my day job

- DESCRIPTION: This week I started installing Ubuntu, and the installer is just too basic.That's ok for the common user, but I like installing in expert mode. With expert mode I mean full control of what's being and how it's being installed (eg. network settings, software packages to install, mirrors, etc). I could not even change to a tty while installing.When installing Ubuntu along with my other Debian, and I missed the latter installer in the process.Another aspect to polish in the installer is being able to encrypt just one partition and even include an encrypted volume manager such as Debian's.As an issue, I managed booting in live mode and encrypting manually, but after a successful installation of the system, GRUB could not manage to boot the encrypted system. Watch out, I might not have installed it properly, but it seemed to me this feature was not implemented correctly. Anyways, I think Ubuntu is a good OS that's able to compete with others

I would love to see native grsecurity support in Ubuntu 17.10. Given the latest exploit news from America's intelligence agencies, I feel that a stronger approach towards security should be taken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grsecurity

- FLAVOR : Desktop- HEADLINE: Fix UI for file extraction- DESCRIPTION: When I extract zip files, the UI when the extraction is done has all the buttons glued together. It is such a small thing that I feel a bit silly for posting it here, and wish I just had a bit of time to actually dive into this myself. I will take a screenshot of the Archive Manager when I am home later today.

- DESCRIPTION: I have such a productively complicated keyboard configuration with the two tools above, both of which will die with X11. I'm afraid I'm more likely to buy a Mac and use Karabiner than go without custom keybindings in Mir.

- DESCRIPTION: For example when on 64 bit Ubuntu and try to run a 32 bit program without yet having installed the appropriate stuff, you get a nice error to the tune of "no such file exists" (the same as when you normally try to access a file that doesn't exist at command line)

-DESCRIPTION: Like ClearOS, focusing on easy server administration though web , Ubuntu Server could have an embedded alternative to it. All the free thirdparts alternatives (ZPanel and others) are painful to install, have super bad UI and deliveries some inefficiency tools due to OS. Even the payed ones have this problems, but most of them on a smaller scale. I've mentioned OpenStack because it deliveries some nice virtualization tools though webadmin.

This tool will drastically increase the usage of Ubuntu Server inside home servers/small hosting providers, since cPanel is payed and . Ubuntu Server already has one of the easiest installation. This tool would allow non-serverAdmins to use it in small website hostings.

* DESCRIPTION: Swift frameworks for Cocoa controls that allow development of desktop apps in a beautiful and consistent manner.

And while we're at it, give also Google a hand on porting Kotlin apps for the desktop too. There is nothing better for a platform than allowing developers to build modern and beautiful apps to push the platform even further.

DESCRIPTION: https://kb.isc.org/article/AA-01387/0/DNS-Cookies-in-BIND-9.... describes DNS cookies; last I checked, it seemed that Ubuntu wasn't in any hurry to upgrade to a version of bind that turns DNS cookies on by default, and also probably wasn't passing the build time option to turn on DNS cookies on the version that was being shipped.

- DESCRIPTION: Node.js, PLV8, and Chrome all require a modern version on V8. Ubuntu ships with 3.14, which is 4 years old, and does not support modern Javascript. Bringing this to something modern (5.8+) would be a huge win.

- Enhance Auto-Hotkey to import/work with TextExpander key macroing. Not only is auto-hotkey mostly static (yes you can add python snippets), TextExpander on the Mac is so much easier to use (especially when you also use Brevvy on PC to keep your snippets consistent). Would love to see this on Ubuntu or even just any Linux distro in general.

- Add ECC key support to gnome-keyring (SSH agent has to be manually managed when using ECDSA or ED25519 ssh keys). Right now I have a shell alias to run the ssh-agent which is fugly and high friction to working quickly.

- Make network manager more reliable (sleep/wake laptop will not re-establish a network sessions and requires restarting the entire service).

- Convince someone to write a LittleSnitch like UI to the system (something I very much miss from the Mac).- Make it easy to manage system wide configuration preferences across systems (just syncing random 'dot folders' from the user home directory not sufficient).

- High DPI by connection type would be nice (ie. my Lenovo X2#0 is not High DPI but it is when connected to my BL3201PH), not as annoying to me as some but having scaling on at 13XX by 768 is kind of fugly.

- Allow me to disable virtual desktop functionality when plugged into a big external display (similar to previous point) when mobile virtual desktops are helpful with the low screen real estate but when connected to a 4K monitor well... I don't need virtual desktops anymore so they should collapse into 1 or 2 or whatever. That would be pretty cool to 'just have work.'

- DESCRIPTION: Yes, they set the trends. It's annoying to be limited to Inkscape/Gimp, even for basic image editing. Make a first-class graphics/movies/3d toolsuite, even at an expensive price (but always open-source) and web startups would start switching. Of course that means you'd spend enough on UX to make it desirable (asking HN is a good first step, but please hire dozens of UX designers).

- ROLE / AFFILIATION: Java dev and founder of a web product with 2 employees.

----

- HEADLINE: Bump up the security bounty. $10.000?

- DESCRIPTION: It's good for commercials and PR You can then claim to be the most secure OS. After implementing the first reports, of course. Please don't forget to send fixes upstream, and don't limit the bounty to Canonical software: A bug in OpenSSL is your problem too.

DESCRIPTION: it is really annoying that the launcher does not appear sometimes, when moving the cursor to the edge of the screen. There are several bug reports for this issue, which are open for a long time.

In general I would love to have a way to pay an Ubuntu dev to fix a specific bug.

Using Ubuntu on a laptop requires installation of TLP and powertop, then tweaking stuff until it works. For example I had to disable power saving for a specific HDD because it would cause random lock-ups, but it's really trial and error.

By default installing Ubuntu on a laptop should give optimized battery life by default

- DESCRIPTION: The Rosetta/Launchpad framework for translation was pretty good 10 years ago, but has been surpassed by several online frameworks such as Transifex, Pootle, Crowdin, Weblate, and likely several other services. It would really help if the translation process had access to shared terminologies, project and task management for teams, improved translation memory, spell checking, syntax checking, and ways to report bugs or ask for clarifications to original English text.

FLAVOR: AllHEADLINE: only 1 init systemDESCRIPTION: Having Sysvinit, upstart, and systemd all supported is confusing and difficult to manage. Given the controversy of systemd I can see being able to choose between Sysvinit and systemd for a system, but having both at the same time is problematic.

- DESCRIPTION: I'd like my mouse to work properly in Ubuntu (or any of my mice). When I start my laptop, my USB wireless mouse scrolls super fast. When I take it out and plug it in again, it scrolls super slow. I'd like that not to happen, and also some way of configuring the scroll speed.

Headline: Stop the dwindling numbers of ubuntu being used as the primary os

Problem: Any os which is not the preferred primary os is losing a consumer base. One can run docker/vm but that doesn't sum up. The whole system is confusing when trying to ascertain what hardware to buy or migrate over to ubuntu. Since there is no official word.

Likely solution: Setup a youtube like channel to review ubuntu support for popular hardware. Document it in a better way and make it search friendly. Like imdb model and give it an ubuntu score. Have an option to purchase the particular hardware related driver disk or to download it for free. KIS.

- if the disk creator could also create non-ubuntu isos. For me it would only create Ubuntu disks. Also if I try unetbootin it usually doesn't work. I'd either save/have a Linux Mint just for this purpose or use Rufus/YUMI in Windows.

I'm pretty happy with Ubuntu. Mostly it's great at having drivers.

Recently though I haven't been able to install LAMP right. PHPMyAdmin wouldn't work right either. And PHP doesn't parse right away, have to mess around with loading modules. I'm not sure why that is because I have a Ubuntu desktop set up with LAMP. This was yesterday that I tried to set it up on a new machine. Maybe time to switch to Node finally.

- DESCRIPTION: Currently, there is a lot of fiddling that needs to be done to installi3 or xmonad and even after installing, it is difficult to get all the services upand running. It would be great if the xmonad/i3 packages did all of this with good defaults

Ubuntu DesktopDrop the current release schedule.Ubuntu is sadly becoming a boring distribution meaning that with each release "nothing" really changes. The Team should focus on releasing an new version of the OS every 1-2. This will give developers the opportunity to add more cool features since the pressure of meeting strict deadlines is gone. I would focus all the resources on the Desktop and Server Market and then focusing on other markets. Having to release one distribution every 1-2 years will also give us the opportunity to have better planning and focusing on what users really want.A student, a fan.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Server- HEADLINE: All configuration change managed & automated- DESCRIPTION: All configuration management in Ubuntu Server should be managed. For example, editing apache configuration raw on the FS should be strongly discouraged and logged as an error to reconcile with a legitimate configuration change. I should instead create my own configuration package that adds files, edits exiting files, etc. These configuration packages would then be versioned and stored in some central database. If I want to reinstall Ubuntu Server, I then login to the central database, indicate the name and version of the configuration I want to apply, and that's it.- ROLE: Software engineer / home lab hobbyist

- DESCRIPTION: Same as OSX does it. I pretty much never want to change both of my monitors vdesktops at once. Instead, I want it to be context aware and change the vdesktop of the monitor I'm currently on.

Description : I have an old laptop with 4 gig of ram. I don't plan on changing it. I switched to xubuntu because Ubuntu is somewhat slow even when idling because of multiples packages that want to integrates the desktop with the internet (which i don't care for as I use google apps on the web). It mostly just slows my pc down (looking at you evolution-data-server and many others).

I understand that it's hard to have a balance between ease of use and performance, but I think you would do well to think about it. Not everyone has money to upgrade pcs regularly.

- FLAVOR: Desktop- HEADLINE: printing- DESCRIPTION: if you print to pdf from Firefox, you'll notice that the page numbers are not at the end of a page. Not sure if there's anything Ubuntu can do about it.

- FLAVOR: Desktop- HEADLINE: add more features to the trackpad.- DESCRIPTION: libinput knows the size of my laptop trackpad. Is there anyway to tell it to accept touch as click only in a particular area at a particular position on the trackpad? Not sure if Ubuntu can do anything or only libinput's author can do it.

Please, please, for the love of God, consolidate the "system program problem detected" messages into one single dialog, instead of a separate dialog for every file found in /var/crash (as it is today).

- DESCRIPTION: Installation has gotten more difficult for a simple server since UEFI. Often would like to setup an inexpensive (e.g. Dell/HP) server with SATA and RAID 1 boot. This has become a difficult task.

- DESCRIPTION: I haven't been able to connect to the office printer after many attempts. The driver isn't included with Ubuntu and the generic driver doesn't work. Tried installing specific driver via Canon's website which came with overly difficult instructions and it still didn't work.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software Engineer at a (recently joined) company that's switching from Microsoft to Linux.

- DESCRIPTION: I disable global menus (never liked them since the first Mac), I move everything to the bottom bar of the Gnome fallback DE and delete the top bar. I use Gnome's minified running apps list and the icons tray. I use Compiz cube to switch desktop because the 3D effect makes it easier to remember where I am.

I wish I had lenses there but no top bar trumps lenses. I could use Unity if at least I could move the top bar to the bottom. The docker is tolerable because it can be made to autohide.

I would like unity-webapps-amazon to be re-separated from unity-webapps-common and for Unity Tweak Tool to be aware of the presence or absense of the Amazon webapp. Not even because I'm personally worried about it, it's like ~50 lines of javascript total, and it's obvious what they do, but I'm bored to death of talking about the thing to people who want to try a Linux distribution and I want to recommend Ubuntu, but then they say "But I heard this FUD..." and I have to explain why that's an incomplete picture of the event and it's aftermath instead of getting them up and running.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: MATE as default desktop- DESCRIPTION: Its fast, its stable, its GTK3, its a proper desktop, what more could you want!- ROLE/AFFILIATION: software devOh and give that Wimpy guy a raise! ;)

I'm a starting Sofwtare Engineer, just got my first job. I installed Ubuntu to get familiar with Linux since my job requries RHEL 6/7 knowledge. Don't have a specific request. Bluetooth fails sometimes, display sucks after suspend/wake (only on Nvidia drivers), and battery is not so good, but probs because of discrete gpu vs hybrid (integrated and dedicated).

I've fixed the bluetooth one myself and the second by switching to nouveau.. But for non tech people these are dealbreakers. But I also know this stuff isn't up to you (entirely).

Just wanted to say, keep up the good work!!! Hope to see linux dominant on desktop one day!

- DESCRIPTION: Hybernate or something similar (fast load of last is and apps state) Hybernate works on my laptop but sometimes apps freeze after 20 min after resume and sometimes wifi does not reconnect.

Better aarch64 support. Would like to see raspberry pi 3 and upcoming pinebook supported well. openSUSE support these great at the moment on aarch64, I install the image and it just works.

More focus on the old lightweight DE's and less focus on the new bloated heavyweight DE's that are more designed for touch (GNOME 3, KDE, Unity, I'm pointing at you). Xfce, Mate, and LXQT perform far better in that order.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Server- HEADLINE: A more stable alternative to ubuntu-vm-builder (vmbuilder) or more work on this project- DESCRIPTION: Scripted KVM guest creation via command line appears to be limited to 'ubuntu-vm-builder' (or 'vmbuilder' as it is now). On Xenial, I have to manually modify python code to have this tool actually perform guest creation without an error. Would love to have a reliable tool for automated KVM guest creation that didn't incur all of the overhead of an OpenStack config.

By this I mean being able to completely segment my workflow between screens as follows:

Screen 1: Work

- Email filtered for work - All programs automatically put files into the project's folder - Docker containers and even separate localhost so I can bind to port 80 on different screens. - Different Browser history

...I'd like to see for to NOT use 'Screen Saver', 'Sleep', Etc on any 'Installs'....does not this interfere !?!? I've had issues where they messed up permanently a simple normal installation of OS or Program and had to do it again, but without them it always worked the way it was supposed to!

- DESCRIPTION: The same way you can optionally auto-hide the Unity sidebar launcher, I wish I could do the same with the top panel for not having always go to F11 fullscreen mode to enjoy a distraction-free user experience. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/nmDsOMj.png

Something Windows doesn't have: A background Search on whatever you work on, presenting a found solution not in text form, but as a step-by-step executable makro. Basically the usual approach of "search it on google, try it out step-by step until it works", rolled into a automation layer, that reports back to a central database, how your config did get along with the solution.Yes, thats taking the Learning Experience out of Linux, but guess what... it stuffs the pinguin with loads of delicious comfort fillings, like windows once had it.

- DESCRIPTION: I have three tools (or groups of tools) that I still use other OSs for:

Adobe Tools (primarily Photoshop and Illustrator)SketchSerato

I can't imagine there to be much reason for these to not work on linux any longer. I'm already a paying customer for all of these, and it's absolutely unfortunate that I have to load up a VM or separate computer on occasion to use them.

Steam made some major headway in this regard, and I think that momentum should be supported and increased.

- DESCRIPTION: We have aptitude, apt-get, apt, dpkg, snap, npm, pip, etcetera. I really don't care where they should go as long as permissions are not set to superuser unnecessarily. I would love some default organization imposed by Ubuntu to get order in this chaos. Define standard locations for these package managers.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: IoT

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Make sure all sensors work

- DESCRIPTION: Out of the box working Yoga 900 with rotating functionality, flipping 180 degrees, etc. Would be great.

DESCRIPTION: It would be nice if the installer would automatically determine whether it is running as a guest inside a hypervisor for which open-vm-tools is useful, and if so, automatically install open-vm-tools.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: Stabilize wifi- DESCRIPTION: I use 16.04 on three generations of Thinkpad (x1 carbon, x220, x230), and the wifi on all of them is always dropping off without warning. I have to rmmod/modprobe the wifi driver to get it working again. The flakiness is especially bad with wake from suspend. Wifi has been a pain point with Linux forever and I would sooooo love for it to just work.- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software Developer

- DESCRIPTION: What keeps me from fetching too many packages from the Ubuntu repositories is that major package updates take 1-2 OS releases to get into the repos. This makes OS upgrades more difficult to execute because so much is changing at once, but also made me constantly seek workarounds, install from source, add third-party ppas, etc. when I couldn't have a newer version of some package.

- DESCRIPTION: Me and many other are not too happy with the launcher. It should be possible to disable the launcher (not just hide it with a forced "reveal location"). This option should be so easy to implement.

- HEADLINE: Add a setting so that The Launcher can be positioned either on the left side (default) or the right side of the display(s).

- DESCRIPTION: I have two side by side monitors and The Launcher is placed on the smaller monitor off to the right. The Launcher is often in the way because it is in the middle of the displays. I really don't think that this is too much to ask for that there be an option to position The Launcher on either the left or right side of the screen.

- DESCRIPTION: Today, there are third-party solutions for creating periodic backup snapshots and recovery of a linux OS, such as Clonezilla or rsnapshot. These solutions are difficult to work with. This request is for an intuitive, simple backup/restore manager that allows a user to periodically backup an entire system image and rollback to prior saved images with ease.

-DESCRIPTION: There is way too much work now to get Ubuntu Desktop up and running on ZFS. I think everyone would love for you to make Ubuntu install on ZFS by default from the gui installer. ZFS is the one and only reason why I currently use FreeBSD. If Ubuntu would install on ZFS without me having to spend so muvh time on hackery it I would run back to Ubuntu in a heart beat.

- DESCRIPTION: One personal pain point is mouse wheel scrolling. I want to scroll fast when I swipe the wheel fast. Usually I end up having to use the scrollbar (which seems to shrink and get harder to use every year) to scroll through long documents. I'm also a fan of middle-click scrolling in applications that support it, although I don't know if that's something you could provide globally.

FLAVOUR: (I'm British) Ubuntu DesktopHEADLINE: Less glossiness on Unity launcherDESCRIPTION: I use a flat theme and icons (Paper and Arc) to make my desktop less obtrusive when I'm writing/coding. Unity has loads of glossy effects on the launcher, which is distracting. I'd prefer something modern, flat and out-of-the-way.ROLE/AFFILLIATION: Sr. Software Engineer, B2C Food company.

- DESCRIPTION: While I love ubuntu, I think I'd like it a bit more if there was a mechanism of having a minimal desktop, with almost nothing installed except a terminal and a GUI (unity is fine). Generally when I install ubuntu, the first thing I do is remove LibreOffice and most of the other pre-installed apps since I have custom stuff that I prefer to us.

- DESCRIPTION: Linux is amazing for development purposes but it lacks a good collection of 3rd party apps, which is holding it back against Mac OS. If Ubuntu can have a better integration with 3rd party apps like Evernote, Google Drive, Twitter(it exists, but not as good as the original), it can surely replace other OS in the market.

ext4 encryption. It's better then eCryptfs in nearly every way. Carry the patches for the HEH encryption mode for the file names, because who know when it will get merged upstream, and you really don't want broken file name crypto.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: Better support for peripherals - DESCRIPTION: Drivers suckIf you buy a wrong printer brand or model you may end up returning it. Simply because it happened not to be supported by the manufacturer and/or UbuntuOverall, the desktop needs more radical refreshes, bash replaced with OhMyZh, no more Unity and a batter package manager, too.

- Better UI, for most part the desktop GUI hasn't changed for nearly a decade! It's as if Ubuntu looked at Apple OS X and just gave up on any UI competition. I think 40% of why I don't use Ubuntu is because of its look and feel. It's gonna be hard but maybe worth it.

- DESCRIPTION: the software center's ui isn't polished. on certain page, you see improper layout, large white space. there seems to be little update to the software center in the past few years. there is not enough content marketing too, no recommended games/apps ...

Mac thrived partially thanking to the app store. why can't we have something similar under linux?

DESCRIPTION: Anyone should be able to pair their Bose Soundlink speaker out of the box on Ubuntu, but that isn't possible today.Support for HSP/A2DP in Pulseaudio just doesn't work that well and that alienates upcoming enthusiasts who might not have headphone jacks on their cellphones in the years to come.

Description: Every laptop I've ever put Ubuntu on, multi touch is never supported. I currently own an HP Spectre x360 (brand new 2017 model) that I was praying would have better touch pad support on my favorite OS but it didn't. I and I'm sure many many more would love this

I want 17.10 to be able to jailbreak and install on the Samsung 8+. Samsung is looking to provide a phone/pc in one device, but I use ubuntu as my os today and want to continue. Samsung is already doing all the hw and docking work... but their sw is bloated and locked down... I want the freedom that ubuntu provides on a great phone/pc.

- DESCRIPTION: The apt command is worthy replacement for aptitude, but I dislike its search. Too many blank lines, and splitting name/description on separate lines takes up too much space. Plus, it's harder to drop in for any script expecting apt-cache's search output.

- HEADLINE: Allow moving the dock to the right-hand side of the screen

- DESCRIPTION: It's pretty annoying, especially with multi-monitor setups, that the launcher is fixed to the left side of the screen. By tweaking a dconf value you can move it to the bottom but there is no way to put it on the right.

- DESCRIPTION: Ubuntu looks a little dated. Please, please make it flatter, and change the (IMHO) awful icon theme and palette. It's been haunting me for many, many years, and made me never look at Ubuntu as my primary OS.

DESCRIPTION: I've bought a high-res screen with the intention to get more screen real-estate, but it seems that every modern app is working against me by scaling up the GUI. I wish this could all be easily disabled in one place.

DESCRIPTION: It would be great to be able to open terminal from Nautilus right-click menu from any directory and the terminal would point to the same directory immediatelly, so users don't have to cd to directory from home directory all the time.

The ability to use a non-X based installer on the default disc would be nice. I have an Nvidia gtx 1060 and I can't figure out how to install Ubuntu. (I've successfully installed Debian, gentoo, arch, centos, and fedora on this system using curses installers)

- DESCRIPTION: Full-disk encryption set up is a breeze with the installer, unless you have a few different drives and want to use XFS. I recognize this is not a majority use-case but FDE with multiple drives is challenging to configure.

- DESCRIPTION: A nice way to setup a simple mirror drive on your system if its already need installed. Window's disk manager does it nicely and it would be great to see the disk utility enhanced to allow the same.

DESCRIPTION: For many Mint users, including me, I suspect the Cinnamon desktop is the main reason we use Mint rather than Ubuntu. Ubuntu should make it be a supported package, and ensure it works well with each new Ubuntu release.

Flavor: DesktopHeadline: A real commitment to accessibility for disabled users

About ten years ago, I was a happy Ubuntu user. At that time, it stuck fairly close to the GNOME stack, which is good for me as a blind user since GNOME is reasonably accessible and has a small but dedicated group of folks working on it.

Then Canonical significantly abandoned GNOME for Unity. While Canonical advanced Unity, wrote its own mobile-optimized interface, decided not to use Wayland in favor of its own home-grown solution, it to the best of my knowledge assigned one (one!) staffer to work on the accessibility story for all the greenfield stuff it was building. Sure, you could run GNOME in Ubuntu if you wanted to be a version or two behind. Also, sometimes you'd get something like GNOME 3.10 accessibility components shipped with GNOME 3.8, which worked 95% of the time, but when it failed it failed hard. I wish I could remember specifics, but at the time I was busy feeling like Canonical had basically thrown its non-able-bodied users aside. The only Canonical accessibility staffer I knew of was claiming that the goal was to only make Ubuntu LTS releases definitely accessible but no commitments for any in between. That completely disregards how the accessibility stack itself sees improvements, and sometimes things become more accessible by virtue of nothing more than using a newer at-spi/atk. Sometimes I upgrade GNOME not for the New Shiny(TM), but because GNOME 3.next brings accessibility improvements that will make existing apps more stable and usable. But you can't always just ship a newer atk with a GNOME release a year and a half behind, so telling me I'll only get accessibility fixes in 2-year increments when access tech changes about as quickly as any other is, well, short-sighted.

I'd really like to see Ubuntu make more of a commitment to accessibility in this or some upcoming (but near) cycle. If you can build your own custom desktop environment and display manager, then surely Canonical can assign more than a single person or two to improve the accessibility of all that new tech. I remember Shuttleworth writing a blog post near the end of 2012, claiming that Ubuntu would leave no one behind, and that it would be relevant to all types of computing. As a blind developer, I tried to constructively comment that not making accessibility a priority more than once every two years both left me behind and made Ubuntu less relevant to me. My comment vanished into the moderation queue and was never published. Maybe it wasn't the congratulatory pat on the back folks were hoping for in that post. Today I'm on Fedora and, while it isn't perfect, the fact that it stays close to GNOME makes it significantly better for me. All your new tech can be just as accessible, but it won't happen if you make it a single person's job to do that work. And, if you can't make it accessible because of limited resources, then you are leaving people behind and might want to scale back your efforts in other areas to compensate.

I know this might be somewhat orthogonal to development of the OS itself, it might even be a documentation improvement. But I use Ubuntu as my daily driver, for both home and work. I am very familiar with the OS and using linux in general. It took me 2 days across what must have been 6-8 hours of concentrated effort to 1) get dual (and later, quad) Nvidia graphics cards set up and 2) get display working correctly and reliably across 3 (and later, 4) monitors. There are still slight bugs here and there, but now it's very livable. But a cursory Google search will demonstrate that I am not alone in the lack of a "frustration-free" way to set up graphics drivers.

Nvidia now provides drivers for Linux, and it would be nice if they were first class citizens on Ubuntu through a comparatively easy selection, rather than defaulting to Nouveau. I still get errors when I update and restart occasionally, and am forced to purge Nouveau and reinstall the graphics drivers (if anyone reading this has ideas, I would be incredibly grateful to hear your solutions).

Failing technical improvements, documentation improvements would be superb in this arena. It is not unusual for me to look online and find Ubuntu's docs on installing something nonstandard like e.g. installing Nvidia graphics cards from their .sh files. It's not straightforward. Hell, I'd be happy to help improve docs with this one particular example, but as a general community effort I feel some documentation languishes, which is disheartening if the only way to get around errors is tribal and generally, well, undocumented :)

After Ubuntu 12, software RAID support was removed from the Unity install GUI for desktop versions. I assume there was a good reason for this, but I would love it if you could re-introduce it. When I built my current home/work machine, I had to follow the only AskUbuntu/StackOverflow answer I could find, which guided me through setting up logical volumes for pseudo-RAID (comparatively easy) and corresponding permissions/boot sequences (fairly unintuitive) across repeated reboots. This isn't high on my priority list, but again, a casual Google search will show others use it. I think the core premise, that people who want to use RAID don't use Ubuntu Desktop (in lieu of Server) is mistaken, but I recognize I might be in a minority of minorities here.

---------------------------------

HEADLINE THREE: My most unrealistic ask - please implement fallback functionality that bridges compatibility between major point releases so that an e.g. container can be spun up on the desktop to simulate the last point release for a subset of directories.

DESCRIPTION THREE:

I don't know how you'd go about this or if it's even possible from an engineering perspective to isolate specific directories in such a granular way and still maintain system-wide stability. Let me give my specific example:

I frequently work with machine learning and other GPU parallellized work. I installed Tensorflow on Ubuntu 14 even though I wanted to use Ubuntu 16 because there were compatibility difficulties in building Tensorflow from source on Ubuntu 16 (when I did this, it supported 16 through vanilla pip install). I had to build from source because I have multiple graphics cards. This made life onerous because Nvidia has much better support in Ubuntu 16. Thankfully there again was guidance on forums.

The ask: if there were an API that allowed software developers to create containerized versions of their software that simulated a little of column A and a little of column B from different point releases, it would probably make installing software like Tensorflow and associated CUDA/GPU libraries easier. Or perhaps offload it entirely from third party developers and create a very lightweight VM that imitates directory structure for what the target software is expecting - a lot of these issues have to do with naming convention and expected directories, not with actual functionality differences.

Again, this is obviously a stretch ask.

---------------------------

ROLE: Software Engineer, I work in information security and data analysis and use Ubuntu for home and work.

HEADLINE Switching to <anything but Unity> as main desktop environment

DESCRIPTION Unity is the number one reason I hear people turning away from GNU/Linux in general: Ubuntu is more or less the de facto first install, and invariably the ones that go through with a standard Ubuntu install turn back to Windows because they could not get used to the UI. Not that the conversion rate is 100% for when I do manage to convince someone to use Linux Mint with Cinnamon, but I don't hear UI complaints.

Lots of people I talk to use Cinnamon or a tiling window manager, and nobody I ever talk to prefers Unity (even if they are okay with using it).

I already have Ubuntu on my servers, PC, and tablet. Now I also want to run Ubuntu on my Phone!

P.S What's up with the non-commercial use disclaimer !?

To make money you should focus on enterprise and education. A lot of organizations want to run Linux, but the current available solutions are total disasters, for example 10,000 units delivered where the OS installed on them was incompatible with the hardware. Enterprises currently run Microsoft, Apple, or Google and I think this would be a fine market for Ubuntu to make some dough.Whatever you do though, don't sell ads or personal info, but I think you already learned that lesson ;)

- DESCRIPTION: Some versions ago, there was a lot of movement in designing Ubuntu. There were general improvements like the new scrollbar, new icons, a new gtk theme, and on the other side a general push to make it more like an Apple desktop. Some of it worked, some did not. But it all feels unfinished, abandoned. Nowadays every Ubuntu version looks and feels the same, all that is changing are the geometric forms of the pink-brown desktop background, and the old issues remain untouched. There is so much unfinished stuff here one could work on:

* Integrate the modified overlay scrollbar fully into the system. It for example never worked with Firefox, despite that being your default browser. Patch FF if necessary to make it happen.

* Fix the remaining UI issues of that scrollbars, like not being able to fully scroll to the bottom if the overlay reaches the bottom of the scrollbar before the window content.

* The GTK themes could use new variants and a general modernization.

* The icon set looks dated now, and Unity does not present them very nicely. It is a great opportunity to improve the overall look.

* Make your design team actually develop a design concept linked to the new version and code name, and not produce another interchangeable wallpaper of geometric lines on brown and purple each time. Remember what you did for intrepid - it doesn't have to be brown again, it doesn't have to be an animal, but at least get some character into the design. And honestly: https://design.canonical.com/2016/04/wallpaper-design-for-xe... was a disgrace for the design community. Our Suru language is influenced by the minimalist nature of Japanese culture. We have taken elements of their Zen culture that give us a precise yet simplistic rhythm and used it in our designs. Working with paper metaphors we have drawn inspiration from the art of origami that provides us with a solid and tangible foundation to work from. Paper is also transferable, meaning it can be used in all areas of our brand in two and three dimensional forms. Sure...

* Make unity better customizeable - all that apple stuff like having window controls to the left really needs to be configurable. That's part of a good design, and something where you dropped the ball (the global menu not being absolute anymore was a good first step). Embrace the linux UI stuff like sloppy focus and windows that can be pinned to specific workspaces.

Edit: In the spirit of the last phrase, a "honor where you came from" could be a great slogan for such a UI/UX design iteration.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: C++ Software Engineer, currently in the genomics industry, in Houston, TX

- DESCRIPTION:

All-in-all, I've been pushed to Linux out of sheer hatred of the direction that Windows is going. I'll never install anything newer than Windows 7 ever. When Windows 7 goes End-Of-Life, I'll go 100% Linux. Apple's products are neat but they're nowhere near worth what they're priced at (used them in the distant past). That leaves me with Linux and commodity hardware.

Really though, I feel like commandline power users end up taking a back seat to happy-go-lucky pretty interfaces that I feel are designed for airheads (to put it mildly). Sure they look great but they're not productive. If I have to touch my mouse, the interface is probably doing something wrong.

So, what do I want to see in Ubuntu?

+ Is there something similar to EPEL but for Ubuntu (and other Debian derivatives)? I'm particularly looking for `devtoolset` packages, but I'm sure others would love for other EPEL packages that, as far as I'm aware, are currently either old (sometimes super old) in the apt repositories or else simply must be completely rebuilt by hand.

+ The installer should ask about privacy issues (for new installations). Make it very clear, not some hidden thing that's easily skipped or not even seen.

+ Zeitgeist? Absolutely useless to me. I know exactly what I want and where to find it. If I don't know where it's at then I know how to find it (happens maybe once every three or four months). I don't even want it installed at all, it's that useless. It's literally worse than useless: it consumes system resources (CPU, disk, etc) for utility that I will never use. I'm pretty sure serious developers feel the same way. Why isn't opt-in?

+ Unity? Unity is not functional. By not functional I mean it hurts my productivity. After nuking Zeitgeist, I go right on to disable Unity and install Cinnamon. It's far simpler, far more familiar, far more stable, and doesn't waste anywhere near as much system resources. I really like how Fedora has various spins with different default desktop environments.

+ When using `vim` I always have to put `:set paste` in my ~/.vimrc, or else go figure out where you broke pasting. I don't want comments to continue on the next line. I'll add the comment characters, thanks.

+ `apt` is not nice to the command line at all. Try searching for stuff using `apt`, pipe the output through grep, and see how apt warns you that it's not meant for ~smart people~ command line processing. IMO that's counter to all of Linux. `dnf` on the other hand is both far more intuitive and far more friendly to piping around in bash.

+ Turn off ssh-agent and all variations. I will always have passphrases on my keys and absolutely never want that passphrase remembered by the computer. Ever. I will always specify which key to use. And, I have hundreds of keys. I have so many keys in my ~/.ssh that _every_ ssh-agent will immediately cause a disconnect because of the remote server thinking I'm trying too many keys (hint: think about how insecure that actually becomes). I've found that removing the ssh-agent will sometimes not work: it will sometimes be reinstalled (usually an update does that). Better to just chmod -x. And the worst is that ssh-agent isn't the only agent. There's that damn GNOME ssh agent. One or two other ones. But installing it? Oh man, uninstalling it is impossible because it's literally a dependency for half of the stuff in a fresh system. How is that even possible when I can satisfactorily `chmod -x` all of the agents and... achieve what I want and everything still works? Don't answer that, I know how it's possible. Solve it instead.

+ Work with nVidia. We both know they're not going to fix their drivers (cough I hope I'm proven wrong... cough). It literally took me 2 full days to get a working installation with an i7-6850K and GTX 1060. TWO FULL DAYS. That's just to get it to "work". By that I mean that the computer is useable. But it's not perfect: I'm sitting here watching flickering on my screen. Sometimes screenshots are corrupt. Luckily I don't do a lot of heavy work with graphics or I wouldn't even be using Linux specifically because of this issue. That's quite a shame to think that.

+ Work with hardware vendors. Microsoft very clearly has discounts for vendors coughDellcough such that a computer with identical hardware specs ends up being cheaper if it comes with Windows. This is, in my opinion, very clearly anti-competitive. But apparently it's legal? So whatever. It's not cool to "buy" a Windows license (for a negative price point?!) that I can't see or transfer to another computer. I take that new computer, take out the hard drive, put a new hard drive in, and install an actual operating system instead of spyware. What a waste of a license that I'd rather not have had in the first place. I don't care that it's cheaper. I don't care that they do it.

I ran Ubuntu on at least a dozen of laptops, and all of them had some kind of problem with WIFI:

- inferior wifi range- difficulties to connect to some wifi spots- network dying on you for no reason, asking for a reboot- and the winner : sleep mode kills the network for good and requires a reboot

All my laptops had a Windows partition with those problems didn't occur.

This would be y wish number one. I already donated to canonical, bu would actually donate specifically to help that been done. I need my wifi to (re)connect quickly, with no hassle and be reliable.

2. Better multi screen support

Some time (un)plugging a monitor randomly doesn't work while it worked before.

Also the transition between 2 screens settings is scary for a beginer when I demo it. It's hard to sell Ubuntu to an Apple fan when their Mac plugs smoothly into their TV while my PC glitters for 20 seconds with unreliable results.

Hibernate didn't work on half the laptops I owned. Sleep mode can crash some random OS features.

6. HEADLINE: Clean boot screen

The transition between grub, the loading animation, the login screen and the desktop are unatural, the resolution is different, the screen flickers...

7. HEADLINE: Fix VPN support

I always run openvpn using the command line because network manager GUI doesn't work.

6. HEADLINE: No crash when a NTFS partition can't be mounted

I have a shared NTFS partition. When windows mark it dirty, Ubuntu won't mount it. And refuse to boot

7. HEADLINE: Put back the options to custom action of close lid / power button

I want the screen to lock when I close the lid, and laptop to go on sleep when I hit the power button. I used to be able to do that. Not anymore.

8. HEADLINE: improve drag and drop support

Sometime I try to drag files on the icons on the dock, and the icon is greyed, preventing it to switch.

Also when I drag something from a windows below the one having focus, it bring nautilus into focus, hidding the previously focused window. Microsoft windows file explorer give you a delay so that you can safely drag the selected item back to the focused windows.

9 HEADLINE: improve game support

I tried to play dota on Ubuntu but when back to windows. I lost the mouse pointer, sound was cutting, alt minized the game, etc.

10 HEADLINE: improve bluetooth support

Switching to my bluetooth sound system is still tedious. And sometime I have to resync.

-------------------

You'll notice than none of them are new features. Some are even asking for features I had before be disappeared.

I DON'T need new features. Old them off until Ubuntu is fixed. A working OS is the most important feature.

Also, stop reinventing the wheel. I don't need mir when wayland is out there. Unity was a success to me, but it's the exception. I'd rather see canonical spend resources on improving standard tools.

It's a harsh post so let me finish with a big thank you. I love this OS. I live on it. You are doing a huge work. You are fantastic. I love you.

I'm available for calls and chats and tests on my machine if you need some.

1. FLAVOR: Ubuntu DesktopHEADLINE: pinch to zoom with touchpadsDESCRIPTION: pinch to zoom with touchpad is convenient and available on most platforms. It would be nice to have it on Ubuntu and other distributions, too. It is already available with touchscreen on some applications but not at all on touchpads.

3. FLAVOR: allHEADLINE: Parallelize apt / dpkgDESCRIPTION: Installation of packages requires downloading, unkpacking, configuring. Using apt(-get), one cannot install two or more things in parallel. Package downloads could be done even if an installation is already ongoing and requests to install packages could be added to the current installation process instead of rejecting them because there is already an installation running (with possibly priority handling).

4. FLAVOR: Ubuntu DesktopHEADLINE: One-click add ppa + install appDESCRIPTION: It should be easy for users to install applications that are not in the repository. One click to add a ppa and install an application (with any security warning that applies) would be a good step toward this.

5. FLAVOR: Ubuntu DesktopHEADLINE: Stability when resuming from suspendDESCRIPTION: With too many laptops, resuming from suspend is unreliable and may hang.

7. FLAVOR: Ubuntu DesktopHEADLINE: Make Emoji input and display easy and here by defaultDESCRIPTION: More and more people like and use emojis. A Ubuntu should handle that correctly.

8. FLAVOR: Ubuntu DesktopHEADLINE: Show battery usage per application and alert when an application is eating battery (unexpectedly)DESCRIPTION: sometimes, a process uses too much battery and has time to waste energy before noticed.

9. FLAVOR: Ubuntu DesktopHEADLINE: Remote control without configurationDESCRIPTION: it would be nice to be able to help a novice Ubuntu user remotely, without making him / her install and configure anything, even if they are using a public wifi, with low latency (with a possibility to take control with an ssh-like method).

10. FLAVOR: Ubuntu DesktopHEADLINE: Bring atomic snapshots to the common userDESCRIPTION: Btrfs and ZFS provide atomic snapshots that can be used to go back in time in case something bad happened. Ubuntu could bring this functionality to the user by making it possible to cancel an update or a configuration, and to protect user's home directory from human mistakes by periodically making snapshots.This would be a useful complement to regular backups.

HEADLINE: Have first class support for hibernateDESCRIPTION: There are a few problems i noticed with hibernate- During installation you don't get notified that you need a swap partition of the size of your ram if you want to hibernate (moving partitions around is a PITA)- There is no menu to set close lid to hibernate, the go to option seems to be edit /etc/systemd/logind.conf and if that doesn't work the internet has various other solutions that might work- During upgrade form 15.10 to 16.04 this broke and i never got the hibernate functionality to work again

HEADLINE: Improve battery lifeDESCRIPTION: The difference with windows is SIGNIFICANT. Watch the barchart at [1]

HEADLINE: Fix tracker-store and tracker-miner-fs eating CPU.DESCRIPTION: Seems that this is also a quite common issue [2], why doesn't this just work out of the box?

HEADLINE: Help support some 3rd parties get their software packaged and put in the distro.DESCRIPTION: I haven't been able to use f.lux and i think a small utility like that would enhance the overal desktop experience, so would be nice if ubuntu team supports this a little bit. (The alternative apps which should do the same didn't work for me). The point is that the OS should offer at least 1 package that just works. Now this seems to be only done with packages that are like "gnome official", where 3rd party packages sometimes fill a gap.

HEADLINE: Inventing a new desktop experience is great, but keep the options that people are used to.DESCRIPTION: I do really appreciate the thought that went into designing a new desktop experience. But please don't force it onto the user if it has not been "proven" yet. The user should have an option to go back to the old way of doing things. After some years if the % that uses the old option is very small it can be removed from the standard distribution. I think there should be more policy on this. The policy should also focus on what features people really want. For example i had to install another terminal (Terminator) just to be able to rename tabs, it was not possible or i didn't know how to do it in Gnome Terminal. It just seems that the dev team is a bit out of touch with the users need. Also this story [3]

Well, i tried already to post, but that post did not appear..., here my second try:Hi, i'm very excited about this, because we use Ubuntu at our company. I have many suggestions, perhaps i can describe them better this second time :)MultiMonitorSupport and HDPI were already called for, so i will not repeat that.I'm very well aware that you cannot and won't do most of this stuff, but any of this done would tremendously help you and all ubuntu users. And do not think i think Ubuntu is not great. It is. But there's always room for improvement. You guys are the best for asking here!

I am a developer and kind of architect at our company. and we have a downstream distribution of ubuntu. we try to upstream our stuff, but that's not easy with our resources

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core- HEADLINE: support reproducible builds- DESCRIPTION: reproducible builds will help us to write better software and verify software on systems bit for bit, this is an tremendous effort, which will possibly help us all with software quality

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core- HEADLINE: provide fuzzy build recipes- DESCRIPTION: provide fuzzy build recipes (with afl-fuzz for example) with each source package like for example https://github.com/d33tah/afl-sid-repo so it is possible that we can test the software and find bugs. you won't find all the bugs because you cannot test for all inputs, but if you provide the recipes most will try that on their own systems with the input which is important for them

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: please provide more apparmor profiles- DESCRIPTION: the desktop is a interesting attack surface, please provide more apparmor support for example thunderbird, okular, libreoffice, calligra flow, calibre, gwenview, gimp, kate, xpdf, since email, pdf, images and office documents are common attack vectors. perhaps even provide multiple versions for more or less strict version for example for firefox.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Core- HEADLINE: make poppler/okular better!- DESCRIPTION: poppler is an important kind of piece, many depend on it. but i miss important functionalities like layers (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97768) or xfa-support which is needed for government papers to fill out :(

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: better citrix support- DESCRIPTION: citrix web receiver and the ica client are not nice to use. Perhaps you could collaborate with them and make it nicer. Responsivness, speed and image quality often lacks on ubuntu/linux machines :(

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core- HEADLINE: make a citrix alternative?- DESCRIPTION: or instead of citrix you could build a alternative to citrix with libvirt/kvm and spice? :D

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: Support kube- DESCRIPTION: Kube (kube.kde.org) is a new emailclient based on qt/qml, written by kolab and could be a replacement for thunderbird, which is barely maintained. and finding people who can hack on thunderbird/xul is not easy.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: integrate usbguard for enterprise- DESCRIPTION: usbguard is a tool for white/blacklisting usb-devices. please integrate it and make a version, where it can use signed data from other remote sources! :)

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: integrate clevis/tang- DESCRIPTION: clevis and tang would support device encryption and make a second decryption key which is important in enterprise settings, WITHOUT pressing the user to reveal his own key.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: better beamer support?- DESCRIPTION: when i put my ubuntu box to a dvi/hdmi beamer i often see the display only after rebooting. could you make it work that it works already after plugging the beamer in? with other distributions like fedora it often works :(

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core- HEADLINE: more security support - DESCRIPTION: either put more packages from universe/multiverse to main or support security updates for packages in multi/universe too. This is not easy for users to know, what is insecure on their box. or at least make it visible via a commandline tool?

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: docx support?- DESCRIPTION: make libreoffice with docx support better... yeah, it is not a nice job to do :(

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server- HEADLINE: enable kernel live patching and activate it with unattended-upgrade- DESCRIPTION: enable live kernel patching and enable unattended-upgrade for it that it supports ith with configuration.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: NetworkManager and secure certificate support- DESCRIPTION: In Enterprise Environments it is often needed to have Certificates for 802.1x, openvpn or openconnect. It would be great if networkmanager would support pkcs-urls (and the tools which are used by networkmanager) which then connect to a softhsm and the certificates are only available for the networkmanager, which is enforced via apparmor-profiles

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: security audit of qt- DESCRIPTION: Martin graesslin mentioned in a blog post that qt is not vetted for security, it would be great if there's a security audit for it

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop- HEADLINE: make a function/syscall for erasing memory secure in qt- DESCRIPTION: Enable a possibility with QT (perhaps even with a syscall) which erases memory secure even within the qt-environment?

My suggestion is to focus on inconveniences. So far, the ones I've found most frustrating are:

- poor support for a dual monitor configuration with one 4K and one 1080p monitor.

- please include in the official deb repo multiple versions of important libraries where users are likely to download source code that depend on the version not included in the Ubuntu distro. The libraries to do this with are likely indicated by the current versions found in other distros. If a developer is working on something on a current version of Redhat, for example, maybe the pulseaudio version is different and incompatible. Offering both (installed in separate paths) would make life easier to avoid installing a bunch of custom stuff in /usr/local just to work with source code that leans on popular library versions that are current in other distros. Why not just strongly version each lib and let maintainers adapt. It's far easier (and more secure) to just apt-get install a binary version of the right version than to manage a significant amount of stuff in /usr/local or download an untrusted version from universe.

- add additional signing or cryptographic vetting to universe. It shouldn't just be a zoo of everything not official, organizations should be able to vet specific maintainers of universe packages, specific packages, etc. This way we can decide whether to install something from universe without flying blind and without doing our own source code audit. I realize that custom PPAs are intended to solve this, but I'd rather use the official package as often as possible, closely followed by a broadly vetted universe package, and my last choice is to replace an important package with one from a PPA which was customized only to support one application. I get squeamish when I add a PPA and it wants to replace any core library with its own "improved" version. This happens largely because universe does not support a security model that would allow the maintainers of that app to contribute to a broadly sanctioned unofficial repo while still guaranteeing security and compatibility with their own app. Enhancing the security model for universe would let arrangements emerge to solve this which would be stable and would add a lot of value to universe for people who might be reluctant to use universe packages for security reasons.

- tighter integration with other package managers (pip, npm, rubygems, cabal, etc.). In an ideal world the deb would specify a specific configuration contract and the implementation would make it happen while keeping the other package manager's conventions intact. We could then run a command to simply verify if those other package managers had subsequently violated the contract expected by the deb and warn appropriately (and offer to fix the situation using the package manager in question).

- OR, if the above suggestion is stupid, it would be great if pip actually used apt internally, on windows, linux, and OSX, so perhaps there is a way to try to grow apt as a superb package management solution and remove the need for nearly every project to create its own home grown system (or at least make the tradeoff favor using apt more appealing). We're approaching an era where we have virtual open source "distros" like homebrew which are essentially a package manager. Since filesystem size is less and less of a concern, I think the logical end-point (per my second suggestion) is to have package managers which create secure, rolling updates where multiple versions of many libraries are supported. Apt is one of the most powerful systems for doing this, so it should (in my opinion) win.

HEADLINE: Encryption needs to work easily and not be a pain with path names.

DESCRIPTION:

Home folder encryption. Feels like basic security. But there are a lot of problems that seem to come with it. One of these is the path length issue. This issue has been known for A LONG time. To me it is unacceptable that this has not been solved yet. There are a lot of security conscious users on HN. There was just a story the other week about the TSA accidentally giving a guy's laptop to another passenger. All work laptops need to be encrypted too, but it is such a pain when someone has a large path name in their build. And as others have mentioned about dual booting as well as encrypting after the fact (this is an options on Winblows and OSX).

At this point encryption should be an easy thing. Users need to do it but it is hard to get them to when it is not a few buttons away.

HEADLINE: Make Apt smoother

DESCRIPTION:

There are a lot of things I love about Ubuntu, but a lot I just love about other distros. I was a long time Arch user, and what kept me there is Pacman. The AUR is great, but there were a lot of simple things that were just nice. "pacman -Syu" will update AND install in one command. You'd also have updates with negative disk space. I wouldn't lose so much to root directories with junk. I know I am nit picking here but it is the little things. I do find this difficult when teaching new people linux too. "Wait, what do you mean I have to upgrade? I thought I just updated all my packages? What are all these files that it says I should 'autoremove'?".

HEADLINE: What do you want? Wayland! When do we want it? In a reasonable time.

DESCRIPTION:

Wayland, we've been waiting a long time and are excited about it.

HEADLINE: "How do I connect my bluetooth device on linux?"

DESCRIPTION:

I hear this all the time. It should just work.

HEADLINE: "How do I install CUDA?"

DESCRIPTION:

GPU. This should also just work. I'm still surprised how many problems I face with this. It feels like 2/3 machines I install CUDA onto has minor to serious graphic problems upon upgrade. Enough that I just don't bother with some machines. I know this isn't directly your fault, but you definitely have more pull than us individual users. A lot of us choose linux because it is a great programming environment. I'd love to see Canonical and Nvidia have a good relationship. They look to be wanting to make headway in ML. Programmers love Linux. It should work out for everyone.

Im mostly talking out of my ass here, but here goes: Stop trend following with UI paradigms. Being smaller and accept that you're smaller; Stop worrying about converting people and new user adoption. Is it /really/ a priority for the target market of new and current users to have as low a learning curve as possible for UI layout and functionality patterns? It seems to me most Ububtu users are A) at /least/ slightly more sophisticated than the average user B) /actually/ looking for an alternative, as in a new paradigm.

Why not??

I personally love the convenience of the CLI, but remembering all of those commands takes up a lot of mental space. Some sort of visual guide, or better, a way to make the CLI experience mesh with the GUI experience would be totally be the cat's meow.

Again, don't try to be the next mac or windows (at least not by mostly copying their paradigms). Doing so can easily damage a niche product's ability to fully serve its core users.

It's a better idea, rather, to look at the size and profiles (5 is a good number) of Ubuntu users as a source of users who are probably willing to experiment and even actively contribute to experimental UI, navigation, and command input design models.

This type of active and collaborative participation at a higher level of abstraction (at the design and use level) is great for allowing active users to contribute more than a few lines of code in a network driver. I would definitely reconsider using Ubuntu if I this sort of activity started. That would open your user base to a whole new class of technical users, process and user-interface designers.

Who knows, maybe you guys will stumble upon something interesting! If the user-touching design innovations catch on and increase visibility for Ubuntu or better, if they are adopter by maimsteam players, then you would further cement Ubuntu's position in the OS ecosystem, but with meaningful connectivity to major players-- as a place where reallty cool things happen in terms of design innovation. Big companies like windows can't make these kinds of changes very easily, almost any amount of testing is too little for a company with such a large user base, most of whom are less tech sophisticated and solidified in their usage patterns and expectations. Large companies are by nature more calcified. Small companies like Ubuntu can try new usage patterns (like what windows tries and inevitably always fails at), see what works, then, furthermore, can help establish those design patterns in a reasonable number of mainstream users (there are strategies for that) and after a critical mass had been reached in terms of familiarity and proper market-fit, the larger players will put those ideas at the top of the list when it comes time to think about modernization.

2. - DESC: Would like to be able to control blue-light with a native program, as I have had problems with flux (it doesn't seem to be developed with Ubuntu or Linux in mind)

3. - HEADLINE: Exfat support in kernel

3. - DESC: Some devices I use unfortunately are set to use exfat and I can't change them, current exfat support is pretty bad, so please get this working nicely

4. - HEADLINE: Bcachefs support in kernel

4. - DESC: I have been reading about this new and interesting fs, it seems like a good thing to add.

5. - HEADLINE: Add more i/o schedulers to the kernel

5. - DESC: The current choice of i/o schedulers in the mainline kernel is not great, add some popular ones.

6. - HEADLINE: I HATE the current archive manager, please change it or fix it

6. - DESC: The archive manager in 16.10 has to be the worst component by FAR, it is always crashing and doesn't support many archive types out of the box, so please do something about this, as I guess a lot of people depend on this, but it is SO shoddy that I am sure others feel my pain.

7. - HEADLINE: Please try to stop the NIH syndrome of Ubuntu

7. - DESC: for lucky number 7, please stop with the NIH mentality that is prevalent in Ubuntu, sometimes you don't make the best decisions and the rest of the Linux community does, don't let arrogance or your dominance over the Linux marketshare push you into making stupid decisions (see Mir) that go against the general trend in a bad way. Some of us just want an easy-to-use efficient Linux, if you keep making us choose between your weird decisions and comfort, there will come a point where we make the same decision we did when we chose to not go with comfort when we dumped Windows in exchange for a practical system.

8. - HEADLINE: Put more pressure on hardware companies for drivers

8. - DESC: Don't accept the status quo when it comes to shit driver support. Lean on Nvidia and the others until they start to realise we want proper driver support.

9. - HEADLINE: Look into more optimisation (like Solus)

9. - DESC: I was interested to learn about Solus, which uses some optimisation techniques that seem a little underused in the community, so look into giving Ubuntu users that also.

FLAVOR: Ubuntu DesktopHEADLINE: full feature parity in Unity8DESCRIPTION: please get all the indicators and the global menu in there. The dash is not so important and the app drawer is really cool so no need for that renundant scope window =) Keep up the good work you are awesome1!!!111

DESCRIPTION: dpkg, apt-get, and more commands use ambiguous names (apt-get update && apt-get upgrade for example). The package manager on Ubuntu and Debian should be consolidated into a single 'apt' command, such as 'apt install' or 'apt update'. Ubuntu and Debian default settings are configured like someone didn't read documentation and doesn't care about consistency. Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, and other RedHat-based distros are far superior in every way imaginable.

-FLAVOR: Ubuntu desktop-HEADLINE: Webapps-DESCRIPTION: Gmail, twitter, youtube webapps is one of the features I use most despite being virtually abandoned. Since webapps transitioned to unity browser they are even cooler. Please keep suppprting them for the desktop and integrate them with unity (quicklists, sound indicator...)Thanks

This whole thread is full of comments from people who obviously haven't read the article / listened to the podcast in question[1].

Joseph Bankman proposed ReadyReturn in California, which is the kind of tax return pretty much the entirety of the rest of the western world uses. I.e. instead of an empty return, it's pre-filled in with the details the government knows anyway. This vastly simplifies things for most people, especially those whose main income comes from working one job.

This was in no way a change to the tax system, or what taxes people had to pay. The government would just hand you a filled-in form instead of an empty one, so you could make corrections instead of filling it in from scratch.

It had north of 99% approval ratings by the people in the test groups for it, something unheard of when it comes to government programs.

As a parlor trick Bankman would carry around a thick binder with the feedback the program had received from taxpayers. When he wanted to convince someone he'd start paging through it and ask the person he was talking to to say "stop", to ensure he wasn't cherry-picking. He'd then start reading raving reviews of the program starting at that page, some in all-caps from people who couldn't contain their excitement.

It didn't make it into law, partly due to lobbying by the likes of Intuit, but more interestingly, I thought, because Grover Norquist, the well known promoter of the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" took the counterintuitive view that just making the process easier equated to a new tax, since taxpayers might end up paying taxes already on the books that they might have previously unintentionally evaded.

That to me is the most bizarre detail about this entire story. It's likely that it would have passed if not for the strange interpretation of one man to this not-a-new-tax of it effectively being a new tax, and his ability to sway the Republicans due to the political power his "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" holds over Republicans.

Correction: this proposal would not have simplified taxes (i.e., the California tax code). It would merely have simplified the filing of tax returns for the most common case, salaried workers receiving all of their income from a single source.

Very big difference. HRBlock and Intuit are heavily vested in maintaining the current tax filing system. They are not, however, meaningful players in the attempts to rewrite the tax code.

Just for thought: suppose the tax system became so simplified that only goods X, Y,and Z were taxed at rates a,b,c. You pay aX+bY+cZ in taxes per year. It would be easy for voters to campaign their politicians to lower tax rates and easily verify.

Obviously in the real world there aren't 3 levers to adjust: there are probably thousands or tens of thousands. Apart from the lobbying, politicians may themselves desire this, because it would allow them to lower those 3 very-public levers to claim they lowered taxes, while at the end of the day maintaining the same level of spending because they just offset those losses over thousands of other levers. After all, things have to get paid for.

Then at least they can tell the public: "Hey, I lowered tax rates." And when the public's wallet doesn't feel the savings, the politician still wins votes because as far as the public can see, they lowered those tax rate levers. Compare that to a politician under the 3-lever system. Either they lowered taxes or they didn't.

What I'm suggesting is that a complex tax system allows politicians to take the heat off themselves when the public demands lowered taxes, while still maintaining the amount of money the government takes in to cover the budget.

I was pretty surprised to see Zoe Lofgren's name pop up as an anti tax filing simplification advocate. She's the rep from CA's 19th District which covers San Jose (but not the rest of Silicon Valley) and generally a straight down the line liberal. This is not even Intuit's core district -- that would Anna Eshoo's 17th (previously 14th) district which covers Mountain View and Palo Alto. As a resident of this district, I guess I have something to write in about.

I did some work for the IRS several years ago to explore the same idea. There are many benefits, including simplicity and accuracy of filing (closing the $500B tax gap), as well as better fraud protection (another $25B).

Protectionism of the tax return industry is common, but not the primary reason. Instead, the biggest pushback is from taxpayer advocacy groups. The issue is this: for many Americans, particularly low income Americans, their tax refund is the largest check they receive all year. Delaying that refund in order to receive all tax information (e.g., from banks and employers) and pre-populate a tax return would push back initial refund checks by 1-2 months. This is tantamount to political suicide.

Honestly, I think it'd be better to start a non-profit that releases tax software, first. It could compete with tax software, like from Intuit & H&R Block, as most of the needed services are rather simple. It would either charge just enough to cover costs, or be completely free, if donations for the year was sufficient. The tax software support could be done on a contract basis, where people certified people could login and handle queries on an hourly rate. The work from home crowd would love it.

Build it out enough, and then push a few legislative mandates:

1. All taxes have to be easily payable in tax software.

2. All taxes have to be payable online.

3. Every tax jurisdiction has to offer a tax estimation service, where they can download pre-calculated data to use in tax software.

Should make predatory companies like Intuit disappear in less than a decade.

I'm an American working in the Netherlands. Filing US taxes has improved, a lot last year in my opinion, since it got easier to file electronically for free... But compare: I got a letter from the Dutch government a few weeks ago saying I don't need to do anything since as far as they can tell my situation hasn't changed since last year. In the US, some people believe that the tax return that they get every year is some kind of bonus. Here, my employer withholds the correct amount. Why is that so hard?

I wish there were more information about what, specifically, the pilot program included. The main detail I got from the story is that the tax returns were pre-filled with income information.

I think that's useful, but I see no reason to expect a priori that the government would end up doing a better job with that than the private companies (like Intuit and H&R Block) whose revenue depends on doing that well.

The comments that suggest that Intuit and H&R Block were lobbying to keep the tax code complex don't make sense to me. Maybe they are, but that's not what they were lobbying for in lobbying to defeat this particular, reform is it? Rather, they were lobbying to keep the pre-filling process private.

California has the initiative system that means ultimately the voters can make changes to the system without involving a recalcitrant or corrupt legislature. For better or worse, many of the big changes in government in the state were enacted through this process. For example, proposition 13, which drastically changed property taxes, proposition 14, which moved the state to a "top two" primary system, proposition 11 and 20, which changed redistricting and made it less partisan. etc. etc. Moreover the side with more money for advertising doesn't always win these proposition elections.

I find it troubling how many commenters here are so passive to automatic, mandatory payroll tax deductions, that they overlook how effective those payroll tax deductions actually are (and how Norquist is right, if for the wrong reasons).

Yes, government payroll deductions are convenient. Yes, all other things being the same, they make your average salaried worker's life easier. And yes, they absolutely mask how much you are paying in taxes, by softening the psychological impact of making an annual tax payment with money you earned, instead slowly pilfering the money from each paycheck. Most importantly, it ensures you never get to see that portion of the money you earned in the first place -- it doesn't hurt as bad to lose something you never really had.

I personally think this should have passed -- if nothing else, to force the IRS to reveal all the information it really has on you. However, the opposing argument has a point that shouldn't be dismissed as completely ridiculous, because a pretty indisputable side effect would be more apathy regarding taxes, which is not a good thing.

Sending taxes in the US by mail was unnerving for me, I don't know if things have changed but basically you put the envelope in the mail box and then .. you don't know, no receipt from the IRS, nothing. What happens if the envelope is lost? In all the countries I've lived you submit your taxes and you get and instant receipt or acknowledgement.

I am impressed that it only took $35,000 to get lobbyist help to get this law proposal that far.

There's a lot of talk here about efficiency and many efforts to strive for it. What would it take to raise 10x that much and provide Prof. Bankman with a war chest that stands a good chance of succeeding?

> Joe, though, discovered that Intuit had been very busy lobbying against ReadyReturn - meeting with lawmakers, giving money.

How the hell do Americans not think that this is BRIBERY? Are you kidding me? It's one thing to "talk" to politicians, it's another to tell them to vote a certain way and then giving them money". For crying out loud. Sometimes the U.S. can be really backwards* compared to other modern societies.

I love this idea in theory, and basically revisit it every year during tax season.

The tax/tax prep lobby is strong, and perhaps needfully so, as a whole bunch of people have their livelihoods wrapped up in it, butI often wonder if that whole industry is not actually a net negative for the economy.

The problem I have with the popular "simplify" US tax proposals is that they mostly do it by repealing whole sections of the tax code, ending up super regressive and/or hurting the poor and middle class and helping the already rich.

Flat tax @ a high rate: Neutral or slightly helpful to the rich, crushing to the poor and middle class

Flat tax @ a low rate: Windfall to the rich, the resulting gutting of government programs hurt the poor and middle class

Eliminate taxes on dividends: Windfall to the rich, neutral to the poor and middle class who don't benefit from dividends

Eliminate many deductions and loopholes and reduce top tax rate (one of Trump's proposals): Rich are likely better off, no help to the poor and middle class

Reform AMT: Helpful to the rich and people with stock options, no effect for the poor and middle class

Eliminate income phaseouts: Helpful to the rich, no help to the poor and middle class

Eliminate estate or gift taxes: Helpful to the rich, no help to the poor and middle class

Eliminate income tax in favor of sales tax or VAT: Windfall to the rich, crushing to the poor, probably negative for the middle class

The ability to file your taxes on a postcard isn't worth it if it means advantaging the already advantaged.

It would be nice to know each legislator's reasoning. Maybe there's something real in the againsts, or at least makes it more difficult to take a flakey position. Statements should have to come with votes.

I read with interest your letter about the Tax Filing Simplification Act of 2016, and your article "Simple Filing for Average Citizens: The California ReadyReturn." I agree that the tax filing burden on taxpayers is far too high, and I am encouraged that legislators are trying to do something about it.

But I am concerned about the details of actually accomplishing this given the complexity of the federal tax code, even for what appear to be "simple" situations. For the past five years I have volunteered with the IRS's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program and helped low-to-moderate income taxpayers file their taxes. One of the first things I learned was how frequently a taxpayer's total tax is affected by factors other than what is on their W-2 or otherwise reported to the IRS. Examples include:

- complex calculations of "support" to determine whether a live-in relative is a dependent

- exact payments, and nature of payments, made to schools (generally not accurately reported on the 1098-T)

- business expenses

- which months the taxpayer had health insurance (often not reported correctly, or reported to a different person) and, if no insurance, whether an exception to the penalty applies

- what portion of the property taxes paid by the mortgage company on behalf of the taxpayer was for ad valorem taxes (the only kind that is deductible)

- what gambling losses are there to offset the gain reported on a W-2G?

- [litany of qualification questions for various education benefits]

- which exceptions apply to an early distribution from a 401(k)

Although each of these individually sounds like a corner case, my experience is that in aggregate a large percentage (perhaps more than half?) of the tax returns involved information that the IRS has no way of knowing.

So for advocates of IRS-prepared returns, of which I understand you to be one, I wonder what the response to these issues is? I can think of three:

1. The IRS should assume whatever results in the maximum tax liability, and it is up to the taxpayer to determine whether they can reduce their liability further.

2. The IRS should guess based on some combination of factors, and the taxpayer is responsible for verifying the guess (and is assessed penalties if they don't fix an incorrect guess?).

3. We should drastically simplify the tax code so these issues go away.

Each response has some obvious problems.

Anyway, this is just something that has been on my mind, so I hope you don't mind this email out of the blue to try to solicit feedback from someone who might have given the issue some thought.

Former finance professional here: Ford is actually worth 3 times as much as Tesla, once you factor in debt. The total value of the Ford capital structure ("enterprise value") is about 150 billion.

When two companies have wildly different capital structures, you have to compare them on enterprise value, not the market cap of their equity. So while I give kudos to Tesla for building a valuable business, it still has a long way to go to catch up to Ford.

"While Teslas market capitalization has swelled in size, Ford still overshadows the Palo Alto, California-based company in most other financial metrics. Over the last five years, Ford has posted net income totaling $26 billion, while Tesla has lost $2.3 billion. Last year, Ford had annual revenue of $151.8 billion compared with Teslas $7 billion.

And when it comes to car sales, Tesla sold 40,697 vehicles in the U.S. last year, according to researcher IHS Markit. Ford sells that many F-Series trucks in the U.S. about every three weeks."

I think these comparison's to other car companies really miss the mark. Those who are long on TSLA (myself included) aren't looking at them as a car company. Tesla is cracking open new markets in the following areas:

- Self-driving AI (head to head with Google on one of the most fundamental changes to transportation our society has seen in a century, and they have the hardware driving around us all the time already, rapidly learning and improving)

Ford, GM, et al are irrelevant and poor comparisons. This is SpaceX for Terran energy and transportation.

Wasn't overvaluing the potential of newer companies over established institutions with significant holdings one of the hallmarks of .com bubble ridiculousness? I'm not particularly knowledgeable about finance and economics if someone that is knowledgeable has some insight, I'd love to hear it.

Bill Ford gave a talk at SXSW, and I asked him the question "Why hasn't Ford built the gigafactory". He gave IMHO a really weak answer about how they weren't sure the economics of it worked out.

Big car OEMs have so much invested in terms of R&D, brand and emotionally in the combustion engine that I think most are just not going to be able to make the jump to EVs. Nissan and BMW are trying, but they are still making really baby steps.

Can anyone long the stock who is bullish about the future growth of production, cars, batteries etc write down some quick napkin math on future expectations that would justify your investment at this valuation? I have yet to hear a bull case with any actual math behind it, but am willing to hear you out.

Something like:

cars sold by yr, Margins.

battery wall, solar sold by year. Margins.

multiples assumed on revenue and earnings by yr, and at mature phase.

dilution of equity assumed to scale production.

Can someone address those things without hand waiving them away for me? Again, I'm not long or short the stock, but havent heard a coherent argument with math for going long.

I would agree with the market that Tesla has the potential to be far far larger than Ford should things go well. If they manage to get to 500000 cars and full automation within the next year, they'll be worth even more than their current market cap.

Remember that Tesla have by far the best dataset for building self driving cars and this is going to give them a huge time to market and/or safety advantage over their competition. If they launch an Uber clone as well (which they have implied they might) I think they could be able to replace a lot of car journeys with their service instead of paying drivers, something Uber's lofty valuation is entirely based upon.

I've been expecting this ever since I test drove a Tesla last year and got the same feeling I got back in 2008 when I saw an iPhone 3G. The market isn't betting on just another car company but on. car + energy (electricity instead of gas) + TaaS (Transportation as a Service). Tesla has a tremendous headstart on this and in 5-10 years I expect a bloodbath like the smart phone wars, with a only 2-3 main players left e.g. Tesla:Apple::Waymo:Android.

Ford is sitting on almost $16 billion cash. Tesla, like Amazon, burns through cash as fast as they can turn it into scalable future stuff. Whether you consider this good or bad depends on your future outlook:

Being long Ford is making a bet that the future will look pretty much the same.

Being long Tesla is making a bet that the future will look different. (Plus the risks of believing that they can do what they say they can, and that their vision is more correct than not)

If you are a Ford investor and want Ford to be investing in the future, you should be ashamed of them for being either too scared or too stupid to know what to do with their piles of money. Then again, the largest carmakers in the US (incl. Ford) were making a loss just a few years ago, and unlike Tesla, they were making that loss while doing ZERO to invest for the future.

So maybe Ford should be scared.

Or maybe they should be pivoting faster so they don't return to not-making-a-profit, because unlike Tesla, they still aren't spending very much on the future, are they?

We can argue about whether or not Tesla has a good plan or a bad plan, but Ford has shown before that they more or less have "No plan." Their reliance of SUV profits almost killed them in the mid 2000's (and did mortally wound GM, only to be resurrected). Will Ford's reliance on the F-150 (or on ICE expertise while outsourcing most other things) do the same thing in the future?

~~~

I've been holding Tesla for a long time. Currently I'm more optimistic about the company than when I bought it, which seemed fairly risky.

I think the room for growth and market expansion (Important Electric Things and energy future) is very large. I think trying to compute how the math will get there is a mistake, short of making sure that they are not going to run out of money.

Being long technology stocks is a strange game. If you're long IBM or AAPL right now, you're more or less betting that the future is going to look pretty much the same, just like with Ford. It's almost a misnomer to call them technology stocks.

There are only a handful of public companies you can bet on (Tesla and Amazon are probably the most obvious) that are really betting big on the future. The dividends of these will be unknown.

I can't find a number through Google but the number of Ford Hourly/Salaried employees has to be over 125,000. As a guess.

Tesla has 30,000 hourly/salary employees.

Despite being valued 'less' Ford has a huge economic impact for many peoples lives. This may decline, over time, but don't be surprised if Ford/GM/Chrysler combine forces for a huge battery factory of their own. Their ability to tap capital markets with lower interest rates than Tesla is a competitive advantage. They also move many more vehicles than Tesla and get better prices from suppliers, which is a competitive advantage.

Tesla's gambit with batteries is either going to work or will offer a fantastic opportunity to pickup a battery factory at a good price.

At the of the day, when all major automotive companies have EV vehicles, what's going to differentiate them? The accuracy of the self driving software? Entertainment options within the vehicle? Serious question.

Of the major automakers, Toyota probably has the furthest behind ICE platforms. The 5.7L V8 and the 4.6L v6 are 10 years old, and very fuel inefficient compared to the the engines from ford or GM. I think that Toyota really has the most to fear in this case, since they haven't had any success bringing out more efficient ICE/Drivetrains to match the competition, and haven't really managed to scale the hybrid efficiency past the sedan market.

Comparing Tesla with Ford is like comparing Ford with (GM + Shell + Hertz). Tesla is an energy company not an automobile company. It plans to sell you new ways to capture (solar panels), store (power wall), and consume (cars) energy. It also plans to make cars fully autonomous and ownership free. Ford will obviously compete with Tesla in some segments is not a primary competition for Tesla.

Why doesn't this have a huge benefit to Tesla. They always seem to be short on cash, but if you are worth that much shouldn't cash be super simple to raise for Tesla?

Why push for high stock prices if it gives little benefits.

Seems like a nutty evaluation even if Tesla knocks over the established players in the future. I do in fact think that there will be an iPhone moment where established players who have not taken electric self driving cars seriousness will be eradicated like Black Berry and Nokia.

This is exciting, but Ford continues to be a major player. They just invested $1 billion in R&D in Ontario, Canada. Seems like they are on the right path, but perhaps don't have the flexibility and velocity of a (relatively) smaller company like Tesla.

Can someone more knowledgeable explain how is that even possible?Doesn't this mean that the market predicts that Tesla's future earning after discount and after taking risks into account is higher than Ford's? Under which data? Or am I missing something?

What this says to me is that the stock asset class is broken. The value of a stock is supposed to be the amount of earnings you are expected to receive from it over its lifetime (adjusted according to the risk free rate or whatever).

But today a stock's value can be influenced by a cool factor. Stocks that never pay any earnings can have high values (Amazon) and investor mania can out-live any attempted short.

There has to be a better way to set up the market.

What if stock had an expiration, after which you had to buy it again? And what if, when you short a stock, you get the full face value of the stock and then only have to pay the owner the earnings? Since the stock expires, you don't have to worry about covering both the earnings and the stock price, only the actual earnings.

I think the result would be pricings that more accurately represented a company's earnings potential.

My prediction has always been that all traditional car manufacturers will jump into the market with gusto at the next inflection point in battery technology.

The current state of the art battery technology for vehicles is heavy and has less than desirable energy density.

The minute a new technology can deliver twice the energy density at the same or lower weight and lower cost most established car manufacturers will jump in.

Electric cars are very easy to build when compared to IC cars. The simplest fact being that you are eliminating thousands of mechanical components and replacing them with an electric motor and hundreds (or thousands?) of electronic components (for motor control). Electronics design and manufacturing is easier, cheaper and faster than mechanical manufacturing.

I believe Tesla is positioned to take a big hit when that inflection point happens. They are inexorably married to a battery technology. The Gigafactory, as awesome as it might be, is now a large ship with huge mass that is very difficult to turn around.

The next battery technology might very well turn the Gigafactory into a huge anchor for a few years, during which all other car manufacturers, lacking that commitment, are likely to leave Tesla in the dust.

Often discussed outside HN, but almost never heard here: Many are investing in his relationship with President Trump. At least two major investment banks [0][1][2] advised their clients of it and many other observers and investors think so too. [3][4] Again, outside HN it's not an uncommon idea; just search a news aggregator for "musk trump".

EDIT: It's a very serious problem if we lose free market competition, and instead success depends - or even appears to depend - on politics and corruption. Even the appearance will encourage others to take that course, and normalize it. Corruption always exists to a degree, the market is never perfect, but that doesn't mean it's not serious. What happens to startups if success depends on access to politicians?

The surge in Tesla's market capitalization corresponds with Musk's public support for Trump, though the stock market in general has recently. Here's the data on Tesla; I recommend just looking at the graphic, which will tell you more:

* Generally, around Election Day it was stable around $190, on Dec 2 it hit bottom at ~181, then it vectored mostly steadily upward to Feb 21 (277), then there was a dip and it stabilized for awhile; now it vectored up again starting ~ March 23. today.

If I actually trusted the derivative counterparties to remain solvent, I'd reopen a trading to put a long short strategy on this. Everybody seems so have missed the glaring fact that the electric transport isn't going to go anywhere; the lucky ones will have good bi/tricycles, or horse/mules and cart. Motorized transport wasn't a product of humanity's sheer desire for it! It was only caused by the incomparably immense oversupply of energy from fossil fuels, which was a one-off. We can just pray that the transition won't destroy us. Electric lights and computer networks would be nice to salvage out of it. Did you think you'd never use a 100mhz CPU again? The suckless guys have the right idea; we need more efficiency and standardization, not bigger frameworks running on faster chips. I want a 500mW workstation with relatively fast e-ink like display. I'd sell billions of em. Sell your (e)cars, buy yourselves nice bicycles. You won't regret it.

I suspect if you counted the hours they were thinking about their work, the conclusion would be the exact opposite.

Granted, we are talking about "thinkers" here. We can think sitting on the toilet or taking a shower, and maybe even better than staring at a book.

Walking to get your juices flowing surrounded by clean air and a soothing environment would make any hiking trail a great office for any scientist or philosopher.

"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer. "

Albert Einstein

"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!"

> Scientists who spent 25 hours in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent five.

Anecdotally this is a concept I've run into in many areas of life, the most overt one being school, I suppose because it's so easily quantified.

You can do a moderately acceptable amount of work on any given assignment and get a C+, work hard for a B/A or work your hands to the bone for an A+, but at the end of the day all three students graduate.

At a certain point you get diminishing returns for working harder. On the flip side being able to be productive for those few hours consistently without burning out nets you long term growth.

They take a very constrained example and claim that "You should be a slacker too".

This is at best an irresponsible piece of writing that's clearly targeting discussions like what's happening here. This is the 1000th time I've seen a post on this topic on HN, and every time it's posted here it's like groundhog day, same comments. Well this is what publications like these want, they want more traffic.

There are many famous athletes who worked long hours. Ask Michael Jordan.

There are many famous entrepreneurs (actually I don't know of a single extremely successful entrepreneur who didn't work extremely hard) who worked long hours. Ask Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and really any successful entrepreneur who's changed how the world works.

Just don't ask some nobody writer who writes for a blog who just needs to get more page views. They don't know what they are talking about.

In fact, you know what? MOST successful people work very hard. Surprising right? Duh.

It's your freedom to choose how to live your life, but don't tell others what to do based on your idiotic research clearly aimed at generating page views. That's irresponsible.

Also, if you want to succeed, don't listen to these idiots. Statistically those who work harder succeed more. Period.

That said, if your life goal is NOT about being successful but more about living a balanced life with happiness, then go live your life whatever way you want. In fact that's how 99% of the world live their lives.

But again, if you want to have huge success and achieve more than you ever wanted in life, work hard. Don't let these people ruin your life. You will really regret later.

this is such a typical HN discussion; misleading headline provokes reaction to the headline rather than the content of the article. nowhere in the article are entrepreneurs discussed, or doctors, or anyone else whose work requires many hours of clocked-in work.

the fundamental claim of the article is that deliberate focus in a creative field cannot happen without deliberate rest. you can't always be on if you want to achieve the types of breakthroughs which underpin the most significant steps forward in science, literature, and music.

that's it. he never discussed Gates' work habits, except in context with Gladwell's 10k hours for expertise thesis. he then goes on to say that those 10k hours do not exist in a vacuum, and that this number is often misinterpreted; those 10k hours of focus also require a commensurate amount of leisure and rest.

he even specifically says that "[scientists'] legacies are often easier to determine than those of business leaders or famous figures", which to me says that those individuals are outside the scope of his discussion. how so many people here are projecting that conclusion is a mystery to me.

Richard Hammings anecdotes of famous scientists would suggest otherwise... They may not look like they were working but They were always thinking on their problem. Working on a problem doesn't need to be done sitting in your desk but it can be done while on hikes with your colleagues or locked in the attic of your room.

One of my favorite quotes is: "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years." - Bill Gates

Working long hard inefficient hours might get you short term gains, but consistent effective work over years will bring long-term success.

Typically (for me) putting short time constraints on projects amplifies my focus and cuts down on wasted time. The best way to cut down time is to have a well planned path of execution (know what you're doing before you sit down and don't do anything else).

That's how you can be successful without necessarily working long hours.

I'm not successful in terms of my own standards, but I think this makes sense.

The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest working hours.

If Darwin spent most of his time "hiking mountains... or just sitting and thinking", guess what he was actually doing? Yep, he was studying, and working. Just because he was not hunched over a table or a microscope does not mean he was not studying.

There was a poll on HN a couple of years ago that asked how many productive hours each reader had in a given day, and if I remember correctly there was a large plurality that picked 4-6 and a rather large group that picked 2-4. Which seems to square fairly well with my personal experience and that of the scientists in the piece. I often wonder how much actual work people who spend 80 hours in the office are actually getting done.

Maybe I missed it in this story, but this anecdote about Poincare himself is apropos:

"The famous French mathematician Henri Poincar was very interested in mathematical creativity. He describes a period of hard and seemingly fruitless effort to solve a problem, from which he took a break to join a geological expedition. As he was stepping on a bus, he made one of the most important breakthroughs of his life. The solution came to him out of nowhere, and was accompanied by a perfect certainty as to its correctness"

Actually what I can read in the article is that they have in common to work long hours.

The very first example about Darwin already mentions that he gets 3x 1.5h stretches of dedicated work in, every f'n day. That's way more what the common 80h/week employee gets in with all the meetings, cross-office talk, and water-cooler waits. Even if you don't consider that "every day" probably also includes weekends.

Famous scientists apparently didn't just work a lot, they worked very efficiently to achieve something like that.

Note that work hours mostly means hours spent at one's job site (e.g., at their university in the case of an academic scientist).

My experience observing people when I was at Caltech, and observing a few top software and hardware engineers in industry, is that the most productive people do work the way Bruce Banner handled anger in the Marvel movie "The Avengers":

Steve Rogers: Doctor Banner, now might be a good time for you to get angry.

Darwin was thinking during his walks. During his writing tasks much of the activity was mechanical or the consolidation of notions arrived at during leisure. What society regards as 'work' largely comprises the application of existing knowledge and the running of errands.

>He was passionate and driven, so much so that he was given to anxiety attacks over his ideas and their implications.

Emotions driving emotions? No, he was right to be anxious about the consequences of his work. Though marvellous and important and interesting, not to mention true, it set up a huge conflict in the psyche of the West due to the competing claims of science and religion. Which still hasn't been resolved.

I will add a personal anecdote from software development. On one project I had a difficult objective (to write a database that met certain criteria). I had never done database work before.

For the first year, I worked with almost no supervision and developed a routine where I would select an area to work on, give it a week, and if I could find no good solution, would switch to something else. All the while I read many related technical papers. Often after a couple weeks of "not working on the problem" I would think of a clean solution and implement it fairly quickly.

After that year, I got a new boss who insisted that I schedule my work using agile techniques, which meant that when I started something I had to focus on it until it was delivered, while trying to meet my estimates, planned to at most a two-day delivery cycle.

My productivity in the second year was terrible and much of the coding I did then sucked, as it was full of hacks designed to make my first, sloppy approach work quickly.

For me, downtime, and reading papers that were indirectly related to my problem area, vastly increased the quality and quantity of work done.

[Darwin] was passionate and driven, so much so that he was given to anxiety attacks over his ideas and their implications.

He many not have spent that many hours sitting at a desk, but he had to be directing a tremendous amount of mental effort and attention to his work to have this sort of reaction. The article describes his not-sitting-at-a-desk time as "downtime," and maybe that's half-defensible. But that "downtime" probably isn't something I'd recognize as leisure time, either.

Here's something else that many successful 19th/20th century artists, scholars, writers, and scientists turn out to have had in common, the other side of the same coin, perhaps: sufficient economic prosperity (often familial) to employ servants. They could devote great swaths of time and attention to their work, even when away from a desk, because they were not fretting about the grocery shopping, not wondering if they should be pushing the kids harder on their ABCs, etc.

The class structure and sexism that made such arrangements common also surely squandered enormous amounts of human potential.

Depends on whether whatever you are doing is something with a finite goal and has clear steps (e.g, deliver a prototype, complete testing, complete a presentation, prepare for a test etc.) or something that is more exploratory and you are not really sure what you are looking for. Most of the work we do is of the first kind. In that case, the amount of work accomplished is directly proportional to time spent*focus. For the second type of work, there is no correlation. You just have to train your neurons to try all combinations until something clicks. People who are not doing research or art (i.e, most of us, despite what we'd like to believe) can and will see more results if they spend more time. You need to be able to recognize whether you are doing type 1 or type 2 work and plan accordingly. Time and focus is not going to help in type 2 work beyond a minimum. If you are doing type 1 work and stretching yourself, recognize the trade-offs you are making and don't burn out.

Since so many people here are talking about how "in science it's different, you need to just chill out. Science is all about creativity and you shouldn't work hard if you're in a "creative business"", let me just leave this link here: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/

If one of the best mathematicians of our time is saying "Work hard", it probably means more than some rando who writes for some blog.

If you want to just "chill out" and live a fun life, feel free to do so, the world would suck if everybody worked hard. It's actually great that you guys decide to believe working less is good for achieving what you want, because the ones who actually know what's up have higher chance of success.

Teslas and Edisons did insane work hours most people would consider suicide these days.

In my experience these are largely a function of volume, quantity and relationship with your work. Most managers I know can get by even 2-3 hours of work/day. This is true because the work is largely meta- Delegating, tracking things et al.

If you are involved in your work at a lot more micro level, then the speed of the project is the function of your involvement with the project.

This fantasy of achieving extra ordinary things doing just 5 hours of work/day is largely a millennial thing. As a Indian millennial myself, I find this attitude sick. Our fathers used to largely look these things as 'opportunity'.

Mixed feelings on this -- I don't think sitting at a desk for 12 hours is useful for anything other than social signalling, but, there's a Stephen King quote I love: "Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work." Sometimes you just have to grind. Some of my most productive days have been when I really really didn't want to work, but I had to, and somehow the inspiration came out of that.

This is stupid. The article completely misinterprets its source evidence:

Darwin, from the article:

8am - 12pm: Work;1pm - 3pm: Work; 4pm - 5.30pm: Work

That's a 7.5 hour, day which is pretty standard in the UK at the moment. The fact that he fitted a one-hour walk into his lunch break doesn't make him a slacker, and neither does the fact that some of that work happened to involve answering letters in an aviary.

Evan Robinson has collected a whole bunch of evidence that long hours don't result in greater output (http://www.igda.org/?page=crunchsixlessons). This has been known for something like a century at this point.

I wonder if the maximum aspiration of any scientist is to be famous, or even "successful", for whatever definition of success is out there.

I would imagine a scientist as someone who wants to make a positive impact on the life of his fellow human beings by investigating a field of science, or maybe is just curious about said field and just works to find out what intrigues her.

Whether she becomes famous in the act is only a side effect, and maybe not even a necessary condition to fulfill her desire. I have the impression that just aspiring to fame is not conducive to "good" science.

This said, I'd like to see articles comparing the working days of people who accomplish something important in science, regardless of their fame (or lack thereof).

This article resonates with me in so many ways. I barely managed to get into any university in my home country, but once I was accepted to one, I set up a strict and timed schedule of 5 hours of concentrated work each day, outside of classes and other mandatory requirements, and left each evening for recovery. A few years later the structured work payed off and I am now completing grad school at Stanford. I honestly thought I would be working in a video rental store in my tiny hometown for the rest of my life. Let's home the structured approach continues to help into the future.

What a load of bullshit. Most of the scientists have spent a long time actually working, especially in the modern era. None of the successful physicist/mathematicians of those whom I have seen slackers. Each one of them (without exception) have worked extremely hard. Also, more importantly, I have seen level insight into solving difficult problems being directly and causally proportional to the amount of work people have put in trying stuff that hasn't worked till now.

I am not Einstein but in my 40s and definitely doing a lot with my time: on one side it was hard commitment and fierce hustling for 15-20 years in the past, on the other side hustling increases efficiency and high-level productivity dramatically, so that I can now do a lot (and well conceived / designed) in a very short time. Low-level implementation is invariantly slower though, be it by yourself or delegating. As an analogy with more talented people, I suspect scientists finding their Eureka! moments easier worked very hard for a long period in their past.

As a counterexample, Hans Geiger was a workaholic. Rutherford said he "works like a slave [He] is a demon at the work and could count at intervals for a whole night without disturbing his equanimity" [1]

I am quite interested in "how" the working hours are spent, rather than how many. Personally, it's when I forget about time, that I am more efficient, engaged and satisfied. Today I cleaned my house for 5 hours and almost forgot it suppose to be daunting.

Did the same trick, imagining I have plenty of time. Just taking my time...

This may have been true during Darwin's time, but it simply does not apply in today'a academic world. The level of competition for grants, publications, etc. is way, way higher than before. Not that I've conducted a survey, but I'm pretty sure every professor at an R1 university works at least 60 hours a week, if not more.

There is being at work for long hours and actually being productive during that time. They are different things.

There are still many jobs and/or management mentalities that see "butt in seat" as productive time. Especially in "brain labor" jobs versus physical labor jobs where your time working is inherently productive.

I think there is a sweet spot of 30h a week. 60 hours and you are tired as hell and don't get the rest of your life managed. 20 or less and you don't really focus on it and take forever to get a little step ahead.

Put another way, these people worked long hours, so long as you recognize what kind of work they were doing. I mean, they were not shoveling coal. I think humans have some bias such that we don't recognize thinking hard as hard work.

The thing I want to know is how did they achieve the independence, whereby they could focus on their problem of choice and not have to continuously context switch to problems of other people's choosing?

Going through his portfolio, my sarcastic side trying to find something that will somehow justify for my mind why a person's writing is so good that he gets paid for it consistently. Flip through, see [0] A picture of a boy playing in a puddle with a Washtub on his head, with the caption:

"The joy of being five.

You've got just 365 days to capture it".

Ok, now I get it. (goes to my soon to be 6 daughter and gives her a huge hug, and wish I have taken more pictures, and telling my wife I just got something stuck in my eye)

Its rare that you come across a unique personal pitch tactic with this much selling power and focus. For me, this was one of those rare occasions where it actually happened. This guy seems very good at what he does.

It truly is about presenting those small wisps of childhood joy through simple stories. Unfortunately, only small projects are fit for that, as corporate staff generally loathes any risk or anything different from the "standard".

For example, I was once asked to do a Christmas video for a plumbing company and was shown the last year's version, which was simply shot after shot of the company's staff saying their names to the camera.

I decided to write an actual Christmas carol about a mouse that got stuck in the drain due to broken dishwasher hose on Christmas Eve and got saved by the company's employees. Though the client praised my writing skills, she said the script got rejected because the higher-ups didn't appreciate the thought of mice in customers' homes.

One usability note: I would turn 'less / more hard sell' either side of the slider into links that move it forward/back as keeping my mouse pressed down on the slider reading through all the options was a little cumbersome.

Common, we're not here to get advertising, even if it's well done, I really don;t care about your skills, your supposed talent, and you B&W website. You might want to think you're special, but I still want to see something I could think of of special..

I've only recently started reading about deep neural networks, and the thing that strikes me the most about the literature is the lack of mathematics.

Open a NIPS paper from 2010 or so, and you'll see extremely dense mathematics: nonparametrics, variational approximation, sampling theory, riemannian geometry. But from my (admittedly small) sampling of the convnet / RNN literature there really doesn't seem to be much maths there. The typical paper seems to run along the lines of "We tried this, and it worked".

I'm not sure whether there's anything to learn from this observation, but I think it's striking all the same.

My one takeaway from this is that the future will be a scary place. This is impressive work, so please don't take that as a knock against this phenomenal work.

This shows that computers soon will have the ability to fool our senses so well that we may not even believe reality when it is right in front of us. Some of the pictures, when I was just viewing them (before reading captions or titles) looked real. I was astounded to see that they were derivatives from paintings.

The implications are significant, not just in things like gaming, or finance, but especially in psychology, where the delicate aspects of the mind may be easily disrupted. I expect there will be numerous growth in neuroses over the coming decades. Technology will have surpassed natural evolution by such a margin, that it could be difficult to recover.

While this is undoubtedly very impressive, I think it's just another logical step to what we've been seeing so far:

- In the past, you needed to have a pianist at home to perform you a song, with the music box and then the phonograph you don't need to hire anyone anymore. It's probably not as good as a live performance (maybe?), but it's good enough for many people, and much much cheaper, faster, and available.

- You needed advanced knowledge and equipments at home to produce magazine-style tri-fold leaflets or wedding invitations, with modern word processors you can use a template and be alright. It's probably not as good as a professionally customized design (maybe?), but it's good enough for many people, and much much cheaper, faster, and available.

- You used to hire a photographer or an artist to have your portrait photographed/painted, now you can do with your NVIDIA card at home. It's probably not as good as a professionally painted one, but it's good enough for many people, and much much cheaper, faster, and available.

This style transfer idea, though eye candy and sometimes impressive, seems to be the core application of deep learning these days. Franois Chollet tweeted something like that two years ago about the prisma app (yes it was 2015). He back then anticipated many other killer apps behind the corner but it seems not much had materialized. It's 2017 now and people are still super excited about yet another style transfer network. I'm not even sure where this would be practically useful, aside from being yet another photoshop/instagram filter. Am I the only one skeptical about this?

My favorite of the results tended to be [anything] -> Ukiyo-e/Cezanne. I think because these are easier problems, lots of detail to less. The transfiguration and painting -> photo have me firmly in the uncanny valley, but I suspect this harder problem will be solved given more training.

very very cool. One thing I noticed that with image to image translation tasks the output tends to be a bit "organic" looking, like the photo to map example. With photographic output it's not noticeable, but it's very jarring for graphical output.

I wonder if there is a way to fix this, possibly by stacking another GAN on top?

and it dealt with it reasonably well. The only part it couldn't understand was `branch -d` at the end. In other words, it was not capable of recognizing that the non-option arguments to `xargs` should actually be recursively interpreted as a command-line.

I would love it if the site was encrypted so that I could input raw commands at work without modifying sensitive information. (Yes I understand the host can still record this sensitive information, and no I have not looked through the source code yet to see that this doesn't occur).

This works well, but the web interface seems like an unnecessary layer on top of what could just be a terminal based tool. I'm trying to resist the urge to fork this, putting another project on my todo list I will never finish

Cool tool. I think what would really be the icing on the cake is if it substitued the actual command into the documentation. Removing that one layer of indirection would make it that much easier to understand.

For example:

foo() { bar }

> This defines a function named "foo".

Also that example fails to parse. Even though :() { :|: };: works so it seems like there is a certian amount of special casing.

If you hover over something that points to a description that's not currently in view, you can't scroll to the description without unhovering and hence unhighlighting the line pointing to the right description.

There are several commands on OS X that behave a bit differently from their traditional UNIX counterparts. grep is the big one that springs to mindany given grep shell-fu may just not work on OS X and I'll find myself having to reconstruct the arguments from scratch to get it working.

I'd love to see a fork of explainshell or an option in the interface to deal with items like this which are specific to OS X. Let me put a grep command in for OS X and have it show me what options I'm using which are undocumentedthat would be nifty.

I guess this means we can officially stop hating on Microsoft for having such a lax attitude towards security, considering their last OS to suffer from that attitude was released 16 years ago, and it accounts for less than 3% of present day traffic according to statcounter.com

Meanwhile according to the same stats, Android sits around 37.9%, and I have to wonder just how many of those devices are still impacted by for example the 2015 libstagefright vulnerability. Given Google's guiltless ongoing "throw code over the wall" approach to security and passing the buck on to vendors who almost never ship firmware updates for old handsets, perhaps now is the time for us to begin holding Google to the same standard we applied to Microsoft a decade ago.

Google Security Team, here's your call to stop pontificating on the Project Zero blog and throwing cheap muck at Microsoft. You've got an even bigger and more complicated mess to clean up, you dug the hole yourself, it's going to take you longer, and you should have started on it years ago

edit: If it weren't clear, the tragedy here is that instead of most devices being governed by a well-tested security process owned by a single responsible vendor, they're at the mercy of a plethora of downstream vendors who do nothing, with the ultimate upstream washing its hands and paying little more than immature lip service to the issue, never mind having anything that even remotely resembles a solid process.

On one hand, this is a truly incredible accomplishment for Google, and in so little time! On the other, it's sort of amazing this hadn't happened already - so, so many people in the developing world are entirely reliant on mobile, and mostly use low-end Android phones.

I use a Moto G4 and the experience is shockingly good for a device that costs less than a bar tab. It's no wonder that low-end Android's are winning, based on my experience with it. It's not the same caliber of phone as a new iPhone or a Pixel, but the difference is not worth $800.

And all of this is mostly open source, runs on Linux using Java, and can be developed on for free. This seems like a good timeline! (even if the API isn't that great)

I had recently been looking for a laptop to replace my wife's aging machine. She wanted something to hit all her social media stuff, save pictures and videos, basic office, and watch her tv and movie streams.

I had a barely-used lenovo that I had put xubuntu on that I wanted her to try first to gauge her size and performance requirements, but she wasn't ready for linux. I searched around a bit (knowing putting windows 10 back on there was not an ideal experience) and came across RemixOS, a version of android for PC.

That's when it clicked for me. She didn't need a traditional PC. What she really wanted was her phone in a bigger form factor (with usable keyboard). I was able to get all her apps on in a few minutes and she had a workable system with nearly no learning curve. I suspect this will be the case for more people as time goes on. I'm in favor of a competitor to windows, and I now think that is android, not linux.

When I was a kid, I was frustrated for most of the adults can't use the computer so our society is very inefficient at daily life.

I was thinking, since our generation has affordable personal computers, when our generation become adults, the world will finally embrace the efficiency of computer where everything is computer-friendly and everyone can write code.

I was wrong.

The birth of so called "smartphone" made everyone dumb. The smartphone does not encourage its user to write code or text. They mostly consume the information provided by a handful of people who can use efficient input device, the keyboard.

My generation and the next generation were infected by the smartphone. Those hand-sized, touch-screen pathetic computer is the only computer most people ever use nowadays.

I refuse to own a smartphone. Since our society become so smartphone-friendly, not owning a smartphone makes me really inefficient at daily life. But I don't want to own a computer which tried so hard to prevent me to replace OS, modify the software, writing code and text.

When I was younger there IBM, Apple, Be, and Microsoft were all working on these amazing new operating systems. Now the #1, #3, #4 most popular operating systems are all some variation on Unix. What happened? Why did no one except Microsoft come up with a new operating system worthy of mass adoption?

As the mobile computing ecosystem matures it's becoming clear that it will mirror the PC dominated computing ecosystem. You have the major player (Microsoft/Windows in PC, Google/Android in mobile) occupying about 85% to 90% of total market share [0] while Apple/Mac/iOS will do well in the high end market and control about 10% to 15% share. iOS today controls about 20% to 25% of global market share but Android growth rates far outpace iPhone growth as Apple's first mover advantage continues to be diluted with time and smartphone commodification.

There must be some fundamental dynamic at play which favors the 85%/15% market share duopoly.

I'd just like to point out that Microsoft win either way:Says Forbes: Financially Microsoft is one of the biggest winners from the growth of Android as a platform, thanks to its wide range of patents. Samsung's royalty payment to Microsoft in 2013 was for over one billion dollars ($1,041,642,161 and fifty cents), roughly $3.41 per device.

I've got to think this is the rise of internet/consumer purchasing power in Asia. When I look at the analytics at the company I work for, Android accounts for 9% of total users visiting the site. We are a US-based web company with a predominantly English-speaking user base. Windows still rules, followed by Mac and iOS (interestingly iOS is catching up with Mac and is nearly even).

At a high level, Android seems to have more than doubled on our site in the past two years, which seems to be a reflection more of our overall site growth. Windows is still enormous.

Also, Microsoft, with Windows Phone, tried to be much more domineering with the hardware vendors than Google. And those vendors told Microsoft to go pound salt. Google is letting the hardware vendors be true to their model which is to sell something snazzy, and then drop support after 12 months, with life support for another 6-12. That's what the device manufacturers want.

To all those pointing out that you can't get an up to date release of Android for your device: It's not all Google's fault, but it is increasingly becoming Google's fault because major SoC makers are keeping their Android Linux and drivers up to date.

Up to now, though, enough bits in OEM-specific drivers will go out of date to prevent Google controlling updates of all Android devices.

There is renewed urgency to solve this problem in general for Android Things. Having billions of unpatched things in the field for a decade or longer will be an even bigger disaster than phones that churn out of the installed base in 3 years. Google is building a field upgrade framework for IoT that should be applicable to handsets, too.

That MIGHT take enough OEM responsibility out of the picture to enable updatable Android phones.

I like trying new fonts for coding. So far I went back to my favorite DejaVu Sans Mono as I can legibly use it for coding at size 8. On my screen I can see 65 lines of code. When I tried Iosevka it does look good, but at size 8 it's legibility is not as good as DejaVu, it is about 20% more narrow (which is not too important to me), but it can fit just 60 lines of code on my screen. Less code and less legibility than DejaVu, so I'll pass. But I do love that there is a selection of high quality fonts for coding nowadays.

I found it too tall, like many other similar fonts. Usually source code is not too wide horizontally and limited to 80 characters so making characters more wide and less tall allows to fit more to screen.

However it looks good and may be useful for those who prefer to open more that 2 columns of code in editor, or users of tiling window managers.

I doubt this is going to replace Ubuntu Mono for me (so many fonts have tried, and so many have failed). But it's my duty, and my obsession, to give it a shot for a few days. So I'll spend some quality time with this on Monday. Whether it does or doesn't succeed in dislodging UM from my bosom, thank you very much for the effort you've put in. This is how progress gets made.

I'm surprised there are no comments here about the code! It looks like the characters of the font are specified programmatically on top of a self-contained glyph-drawing library, all written in a custom Lisp dialect ("patel") running on top of node, written by the same author as the font. Really impressive!

I purchased the Essential version of PragmataPro[1] because I love a narrower monospaced font for terminal windows and editors... allowing for a better use of horizontal screen real estate.

Having something that is this configurableincluding the leadingis fantastic! I will definitely give it a try.

One thing that may make me stick with PragmataPro is the fact that Fabrizio has hand-optimized the screen display for over 7000 characters from 9pt to 48pt to guarantee the best possible readability... no weird rendering artifacts. It's amazing, but unfortunately many people are "put off" on the idea of paying for that kind of attention to detail.

In any case, thanks for offering this free variant of a customizable, narrow terminal font!

I've been using Monoid for a long while now and am surprised not many people have heard of it or are using it. Monoid is very similar to Iosevka . Similarly you need time to get used to it, but when you do don't want to go back.I have not used Iosevka, has anyone used both Iosevka and Monoid and can compare them?

Iosevka is awesome! I've been using it for a while now. I started with inconsolata, went to anonymous pro, and then iosevka. I'm very happy with it. I like the fact that it's narrow because now I can have my editor split in three.

Lately I've been trying out operator mono. Still not sure if it will win over iosevka.

I like the way it looks, but I discovered that while I can use SF Mono at 11 points, I have to bump up the size of Iosevka to 12 to avoid eye strain. The result was that while I could squeeze longer lines on screen with Iosevka, I get more lines with SF Mono. Back to SF Mono.

I've been using iosevka (regular and thin) anywhere I have to read a whole lot of content, which in my case is within atom editor, terminal (vim), and irc client (quassel). Iosevka is a feel-good font. The regular and thin styles are very nice. ^_^

Exciting! I'd like to see the faces of all those people arrogantly writing off SpaceX and Elon Musk. He isn't just a flamboyant marketing man, just doing stuff NASA did 40 years ago or whatever sour comments I've seen directed towards the achievements of SpaceX.

It is very inspiring to see a man with a dream reach this far, despite being ridiculed for years. It wasn't supposed to be possible, but he did it anyway. From now on one can always point to Elon Musk if somebody tries to put you down and say something can't be done.

Of course most are not anywhere near the talent and focus of Elon Musk, but it proves what people often seem to discount that startups can make a dent and challenge the big established players.

I see the same when people discuss Tesla. People are very quick to write off Tesla believing it is only a matter of time before Diamler Benz, Audi, Toyota, etc knock them down with a superior electric alternative.

Personally I think we will see in both space launch and the car industry an iPhone moment, where long time established players eventually get destroyed or made irrelevant.

It has nothing to do with difference in talent, but when you work in an established company you know very well how slow it can be for a company to change their ways in fundamental ways. The change in priorities, strategy and mindset will come too late for many of the players.

edit: damn I could imagine something like a long assembly line, one building is a massive x-ray machine, rocket slides into it like a sub-sandwich going into a Quizno's oven, parts get pulled out, replaced with robotic arms, refueled, payload attached, stands up, boom back into space! haha

I will definitely try this because I have trouble with all other voice chat services including Skype, WhatsApp and Hangouts. Often one of those three will work but not always.

But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality but one can still enjoy a conversation perfectly well. High latency, on the other hand, absolutely ruins the experience.

I always see these services talking about "crystal clear quality", but never latency, which is a shame. Maybe there is simply nothing they can do about it. I've noticed latency get worse and worse on the Internet since I started using it in the 90s and nobody seems to talk about it.

There are so many more sources of latency on every layer on the modern internet and it's a damn shame. I remember when interleaving got enabled on my ADSL and latency to everything doubled overnight. Then there are NATs, and all kinds of filtering shit that ISPs insist on. Sigh...

"Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from your and your devices feedback (naturally, it doesnt have access to the contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of future calls on the given device and network."

Is it just me or does this sound like serious bullshit? Unless you have some hard evidence of course...

"Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from your and your devices feedback (naturally, it doesnt have access to the contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of future calls on the given device and network."

> Party A will generate a shared key with B or whoever pretends to be B without having a second chance to change its exponent a depending on the value g_b received from the other side; and the impostor will not have a chance to adapt his value of b depending on g_a, because it has to commit to a value of g_b before learning g_a.

> The use of hash commitment in the DH exchange constrains the attacker to only one guess to generate the correct visualization in their attack, which means that using just over 33 bits of entropy represented by four emoji in the visualization is enough to make a successful attack highly improbable.

I've managed to setup Telegram for most of my (non-technical) family - wife, siblings, mother (she doesn't even have a smart phone and just uses Telegram as a message client on her desktop. It's a very convenient way to share family related pictures).

Voice calls are an excellent addition. If these could now also be extended to video calls, I could likely ditch Skype forever.

The emoji out of band authentication is cool, but probably annoying. You have to read those emoji by voice to the other end, so they can check them. That could be a pain if the emoji are chosen randomly from the 2600 available emoji.

The idea comes from the STU-3 secure phone, where there was a 2-digit number display to be read back by voice. It's one of the ways to detect a man-in-the-middle attack. If there's a MITM, the crypto bits sent and received are different, because the MITM is re-encrypting, and this is detectable if you have some out of band channel for comparing them. A MITM would thus have to be able to fake the voice of the other party.

With techniques like this, you can make an MITM work arbitrarily hard to maintain the illusion that it's the other party. I've proposed some ways to do this for web pages.

I tried https://appear.in recently for a short call with a student and it worked well. A friend and fellow freelancer also uses it, he said. One good point about it is if you need to do a quick ad-hoc call - it is browser-based (probably uses WebRTC), and also does not need to you create an account or sign in. Plan to try it more in future, as well as TeamSpeak which I also mentioned in this thread. I had installed Wire too, both on PC and Android phone, but not tried it yet with anyone.

Closed source, not end-to-end encrypted by default, end-to-end only device to device (so I can't swap seamlessly from a desktop to a mobile session).Not even the protocoll is open, so I am bound to their clients.

Sadly it was the only nice alternative when the snowden stuff was published. That means those of my peers who made it away from skype/fb/whatsapp are now on telegram.

No app wil ever accomplish consistent good voice quality over the internet. Ever. For that it's too much of an unreliable network. You may try some calls over Signal, think Hey! This works well! until you hit a moment where the route between endpoints is flaky, attribute it to Signal while using another app for that same call at that particular point in time would have given the same result.

Only when QoS will be honored by all internet routers will we reach something that is consistently reliable.

My problem with Telegram is I want to use it but they wont let me. I use a budget phone service (freedompop) which apparently is technically voip, but I did not know until I tried to register for Telegram with it. They refuse to send me text verification. Wont work with my google voice number either. WhatsApp does not have this problem. And what if I want to use Telegram on desktop only? Why do I need to verify a phone number?

The UI for trimming and setting the quality of sent videos is really neat. It's still annoyingly hard in 2017 to send videos from one mobile to another without needing to completely trash the quality via MMS or upload an often-gigantic file (captured in 1080p or higher) to an intermediary like YouTube or Facebook (and then wait for backend processing).

I truly love the country of Mxico - I have spent a large periods of time there for the climate, as a place to work and have a wonderful life, away from the chills of winter. I often thought about making a permanent relocation, but this terror is too real and I found myself living in constant anxiety of my friends and colleagues being in danger, and the fear of speaking your mind weighs on you after a while. I am saddened because the people, the food, the weather, the architecture (particularly D.F.) makes for a crazy, exciting mix where the wealth and treasure of history and (deserved) national pride contrasts with poverty and the political and social conservatism that goes alongside. Mxico: may things improve for you, though I really have no idea how that will happen.

I have nothing but respect for the journalists of Mexico and the incredibly valuable and dangerous job that they do every single day so I hope it doesn't come off as to condescending or uninformed to suggest that journalists wanting to investigate drug cartels and the government should set up underground printing presses. During World War 2 many resistance members did so in countries occupied by the Axis Powers and they were able to print and distribute their newspapers out under the most dangerous conditions imaginable [1][2].

Of course, in 2017 it's easier to set up a clandestine press organization using the internet, but I'm certain that there are many valuable lessons to learn from WW2.

It's us, the USA, that is causing this paper to shutdown. The cartels are financed by the insatiable drug appetite of its close neighbor. Our inability and/or unwillingness to legalize recreational drugs is the feeding tube for these vicious groups.

> The committee reported that since 1992, 38 journalists have been killed with the motives for the slayings confirmed as reprisals for their work. Based on that figure, the group ranked Mexico as No. 11 of the 20 deadliest countries for journalists.

I cannot imagine living in a country where posting something online, like a silly blog post, risks my life.

If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability.

Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion.

There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fundamentally believe that no amount of rules or metrics can turn a bad academic into a good one, an unsafe doctor into a safe one or a crooked politician into an honest public servant. We have to calm down with the metrics, accreditations and regulations, and accept that some people are better than others at certain things, hire the right people and trust them to do a good job.

If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it.

-- Attributed to J.J. Thomson (although I've not been able to turn up a definitive citation -- anyone know where it comes from?)

Does make me think some people have been pondering this for a long while though.

That list is correct, but it's only half of the problem. The other other half of the problem is supply.

In fields like mathematics, physics, computer science, grad students have excellent non-academic options. There is an oversupply of PhD students with respect to the number of available positions, but the excess PhD students have fantastic career avenues.

In fields like the humanities, and, to a lesser extent, the molecular biology/ecology, there is a huge excess of PhD students, and there is a very limited number of career options outside of research (for bio, there is pharma, for everything else, eh). This is compounded by the fact that for professors, postdocs are an absolute steal (http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2017/01/price-doing-postdo...). Professors get to pay 50-55k (and that's on the high very high end) a year for a PhD trained researcher who will often work themselves to the bone in the hope of getting the publications that will allow them to become a professor. Thus - the very people who have the power to change the system instead greatly benefit from the status quo.

The real reform that has to take place is that PhD programs need to become way more selective. Not every PhD should have a guaranteed spot as a professor (that would be insane) but when less than 8% of postdocs become professors, the system is in crisis.

I'm sure this resonates with university lecturers all over the Western world. The late writer and university academic Mark Fisher has some interesting points about this effect in his 2009 book "Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?"[0]. He saw it as an inevitable byproduct of the infiltration of neo-liberal ideology into the academic sphere. Setting targets and measuring performance indicators are justified with efficiency arguments, but ultimately cause an increase in bureaucracy and a decline in mental health.

My wife works as a teacher at one of the largest schoolboards in Qubec, and she can tell you that the solution "hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability" doesn't work in a unionized system.

Complacency a systemic problem. When your union protects your job, you don't need to actually put effort into doing the job. Of course, that doesn't mean ALL teachers are lazy; but it does mean that a teacher who works hard and gets better results than average is not rewarded for it. It also means that bad teachers cannot be replaced by good ones.

Of course, preventing public school teachers from unionizing will simply allow the government to exploit them. Perhaps the solution would be to replace unions with a professional order, similar to how engineers and lawyers are regulated.

I think this is somewhat well understood in things like Sports Psychology. You don't tell a receiver to catch X number of throws per game, you just encourage them perform. Likewise, training that more accurately simulates performance is more effective than working toward some metric.

I'm currently a lecturer at a small midwestern liberal arts university. I don't know what kind of job I will have next year because the Dean decided that there will no longer be one year full time contracts and they won't add any more three year contracts. Theoretically they want to have more tenure track job but in practice our department isn't getting any more.

So at worst I will be part time next year which means I won't have insurance. Best case one of the job applications I have pans out and I get a tenure track job.

The reason for the change is, of course, money. It is cheaper to hire 5 part time people to teach the load of 3 full time people because the part timers get less pay and no benefits. Of course finding 2 extra people who are qualified doesn't seem to be something they are worried about...

>"could it possibly be that the best way to get good research and publications out of scholars is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability?"

Sounds very reasonable. Does anybody have good examples of this approach? I have the impression that this is similar to the environment of Bell Labs during the "golden years".

This isn't an academic issue, the same is true of almost every white collar profession.

To apply standard numerical management techniques you either need to know exactly what a person needs to do as part of the process, or be able to evaluate the output, ideally both, and generally neither are true.

In the most non-trolling way that I can manage, why can this not be generalized to the economy?

Why is academia a special case scenario where bureaucracy and regulations create unintended consequences and cause people to expend effort to get around them, but we can't say the same thing about the economy as a whole?

Why do we believe that people can't even manage PhD's at a university, but we can take the same people, put them in government, and expect them to, for example, manage the monetary supply or see bubbles in advance and create proper policy to avoid them?

Reminds me of James C. Scott's "Seeing like a State", which chronicles how various attempts to make complex, organically developed institutions organized and intelligible has historically made things much, much worse, from planned cities to collective farms. If it ain't broke...

While I think there is a lot of truth to this, I don't see how it can effectively be applied to our existing educational institutions. They've sort of become a self-serving bureaucracy at this point, so even without misguided policy pushing them in the wrong direction, I don't think doing the best work they can is actually their primary focus.

My take on the desire to regulate/manage is that some people would rather have an economy of perverse incentives than tolerate the inevitable abuses caused by lack of accountability. Management in the programming world feels the same way. At first, to many of us, this seems foolish and counter-productive, but then think: how does a university policy maker or a manager explain the rotten eggs (low output academics, unproductive developers) to their "boss," which might be the tax paying public or a budget strapped firm? How does a competitive university distinguish itself in a communicable/verifiable way? Could I be fired, or in the private sector sued for letting smart people fuck up unsupervised? It is difficult to trust others when the worst case outcome exposes us to catastrophic consequences.

I personally agree with the author, but I think there's serious work that could be done to mitigate or remove the incentives to manage, and I don't think those are as thin as "tell people to stop trying to control what they can't"

So many early-career researchers (myself included) bemoan this system and it pushes many of the away from academia and towards fields where you aren't constantly playing tricks (fake co-authorship, salami publishing, over-hyping conclusions) to get ahead in a game where everyone's striving for a tiny number of badly paid jobs.

If the blog post seems anecdotal, there's a great, underused book, 'Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations' by Robert Austin that covers his CMU PhD work, which came to the same conclusion as the quote attributed to Harford: "If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability." It doesn't hurt to make sure they don't have to worry about where to get, e.g., paper clips, lunch, or health care, so some level of administration is helpful.

Back in 2010 there was an attempt to put Deliverology in place at California State University. It basically means that academia will be measured by targets. A horrible idea that made the California Faculty Association meet and decide on almost mutiny. They even invited John Seddon who wrote several books on the subject of how Deliverylogy twisted and perverted systems in the UK. Fortunately for us, the video of his presentation is available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/8EGMlCau6iU for part 1, and has about 5-6 parts.

If you liked that, then I would highly recommend watching John Seddon's presentation about how settings targets and implementing broken IT systems to enforce those targets are a horrible idea. https://youtu.be/hbNsQFd8DQw

I have a different take its the lack of pay for professors and the lack of respect for public education (On average a college professor makes less then a public school teacher, in my discipline I would have averaged about $20k less IF I got tenure)

As a former academic professional (Librarian at a college) The high cost of college is based on the demands of students. 30 years ago there was no internet, no smoothy bar equipped fitness rooms, no pretty dorms and everything upscale. No pay increase for staff and I actually went through 3 years with no cost of living increases while the cost for college went up 15%.

Then the idea that Public Education in the US is a failure (Totally false narrative except in the cities and other low income communities). So people believe that private investment and legislation will fix things. This just has people coming in making and taking the money from teachers and the community and taking them else where.

This article, and the follow-up on it (link is in the article) is about something very important, and should be more widely known about and discussed by anyone with an interest in science, research, and funding for it all.

It points (yet again - as we've all seen the various p-hacking commentary) to the very real problems in scientific research that seemingly threaten to undermine it - especially from the public's point of view.

It has been said that "religion poisons everything" - there is probably a corollary of "politics poisons everything" as well; both of these are really just social control and exhibition proxies. Ultimately, human nature rears its head, and the want for more money, power, and prestige (at all levels) leads to these results.

...and society becomes poorer for it.

The questions and the proposed ideas aiming at solutions to the problems discussed sound plausible (or workable) on the surface, but I tend to wonder if any and all solutions will just be able to be gamed anyhow?

At any rate, I'm glad that this was posted, though I despair at it leading to any solution, as it seems the problems lie within our psychology and society, and are thus nearly intractable.

I think we need to rethink what we consider academically important which should be taught at universities and then what should be taught as self studies.

I can't help but thinking that one of the real problems is that a lot of academia isn't that valuable anymore as a field of study.

Don't get me wrong I consider ex. philosophy as one of the most important fields but I also feel like it doesn't belong as an indiependent discipline anymore. Maybe I am wrong but after postmodernism I really don't see what new revelations are going to be of fundamental value to society.

I see plenty of need for applying philosophy in various fields as interpretation of those fields such as neuroscience, quantum mechanics, technology etc. but as a stand alone field I think it gave us what we needed. And even if I am wrong you don't need an academic faculty to support it anymore.

I feel the same with something like psychology which to me is even more problematic as it it's based on a premise that you can learn about the human mind by studying humans. Again it should be tied to something like Neuroscience instead.

That way the fields are put to good use rather than being self servant.

I am aware this might not be a popular opinion and it's not something that I am 100% certain of myself but it seems to be that a lot of academia could be learned without large institutions to support and and thus with the need to measure it the only way large institutions normally can.

I had a similar problem with hiring product designers. How do you get & measure great design? What I ultimately decided was, the only way to get great design, is by hiring great designers, and only other great designers recognize who's very promising vs. who's not, with some degree of success.

Research is the same. However, due to the inherent entanglement of historical biases with merit, it became very fraught in the U.S. to rely on expert judgment to pick new professors, every school clamoring to find some objective metrics to avoid charges of discrimination.

This is coupled with the fact that most departments are filled with mediocre people who are not particularly qualified to pick promising young scientists to begin with.

So ironically, discrimination is still there & at times worse, but now there is metricized cover for this bias. "We found that tall white dude X has more publications than Y".

Meanwhile, academia right now is almost irrevocably filled with pedantic scientists, drip-feeding papers with maximal verbiage at a steady pace.

The system is managed perfectly to minimise agendas being undermined. Those in power have worked their entire lives to gain it and will have no issue papering over any accusation that veracity is not their sole priority, let alone a complete farce. "In many scientific fields, results are often difficult to reproduce accurately, being obscured by noise, artefacts, and other extraneous data. That means that even if a scientist does falsify data, they can expect to get away with it or at least claim innocence if their results conflict with others in the same field. There are no "scientific police" who are trained to fight scientific crimes; all investigations are made by experts in science but amateurs in dealing with criminals. It is relatively easy to cheat although difficult to know exactly how many scientists fabricate data" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_misconduct

I think one way to 'treat' this would be to acknowledge that certain things just cannot be optimized easily with outside incentives, and to simply accept that there will be some inevitable waste when you let 'good people do their job as best as they can'.

It's ironic that we fret so much about professors that 'retire on the job', but at the same time think it is perfectly fine to steal time from the motivated researchers, by making them playing these silly games too.

Who really thinks the next breakthrough will come from a person that was forced into writing another paper, just to pass some arbitrary performance threshold?

If you consider research as a 'stochastic race', i.e. many people working on a problem with their own intuitions and approaches, it makes no sense to slow down those that are most likely to come up with a good solution (those that are self-motivated). IMHO, it does not really matter if those that are unlikely to contribute much (retired on the job) get a free pass. After all, even to receive tenure takes a lot of effort (and thus, ambition) nowadays, so at least in fields with a competitive job market (i.e. good salaries outside academia) it makes no sense to strive for a tenured position and then not do what you love (i.e., research).

BTW Daniel Lemire's blog has many interesting posts on the more absurd aspects of academia, including research grants (e.g. http://lemire.me/blog/2009/09/15/the-hard-truth-about-resear...). IIRC one of his suggestions was so fund people (for longer terms), not 'projects'. This may not always be possible (e.g., if you need expensive equipment), but in many fields it would make much more sense.

Since here many things are about start-ups, what about a start-up for developing a better academia, a way for great people to expand the frontiers of knowledge?

Tim harford Ted talk about error and evolution is about how the only way to manage complex system is about trial and error, perhaps he would subscribe that trial and error is the only way to search for a better way of managing academia.

I would suggest to teach and emphasize the role of science and technology for our future. Social esteem for the role of the scientist and technologist is important to nurture scientific talent. Reading Paul Drucker book about how America respect for the technological man and British respect for science man explains why America took the lead in technology. For young people motivation to solve some very important problem by means of science and technology and giving them freedom, good money and respect is the right combination to make the any field advance.

There a a lot of comments here and the take-away for me is that managing academia is a very difficult task and nobody knows how to do it. Some people recognize that we could make more harm than good by adopting short-sight metrics, I consider fortunate that people recognize that sometimes we don't know all the answers and that the best we can do is to share information about this complex task.

All employers want their employees to "do the job to the best of their ability". But the freedom given to you to decide how your success is measured is proportional to your experience and past performance. There are those in both academia and private industry that get a lot of freedom to do their work/research.

But there is a hierarchy to this just like everything in nature. The exceptionally strong and bright animals have more freedom in why they choose to do and how they do it. And that system has worked to get us all this far.

The system this article is pushing against isn't fun for many but inevitable. The further you are from the top the more subject your performance is to poor evaluation schemes conceived by those far from the top too.

There have been a few of these plugins floating around recently, and really everything that needs said about them appears in the comments already. Fake traffic is wasteful, hard to make look authentic, and only serves to create more records of the end user around the web rather than less (e.g. your laptop IP was generating fake traffic? That probably means you had the lid open and were doing something with it at that time)

I'd much rather see a browser with some kind of built-in distributed cache, something along the lines of FreeNet, but trading perfect anonymity for performance. Given a large chunk of disk space, and a handful of browsers talking to each other in a local area (e.g. same ISP), it should be viable to concoct a scheme where after a handful of browsers request a particular page, the remaining browsers are confident enough that the data cached in their local group is representative of the data sourced from the origin network.

There are a million issues to iron out with a scheme like that, e.g. bad actors injecting crap into the cache, handling staleness, interactions with dynamic content and API endpoints etc., but I think something like this would have a much greater privacy benefit by denying at least some traffic to the origin networks, or simply by keeping some of that traffic within the boundary of the local ISP's network (and if the local ISP is evil, requests between the nodes could be encrypted as in FreeNet).

It's kind of funny their website includes TypeKit, SquareSpace, and Google Tag Manager scripts - all of which can (and probably are) tracking various things. They may not be connected to "you", may be anonymized, may be unique number representing you.

Hello all! Recent creator of a similar tool that has been getting a lot of buzz, I am here to throw some constructive thoughts out there!

These ideas are useless from a technical level (for all the reasons that have been mentioned already.)

Where they are useful is at a social level. People are energized and ready to fight. Many of them didn't know about this issue. Many of them didn't know that there are things they can do as individuals to fight back. Your tool (and mine) are getting attention because they open eyes and tap into pain.

As useless as noise might be, people understand the idea and that makes it accessible. That means people will try it, get it, and share it.

We need to leverage that attention in order to teach those people things they need to understand about privacy. Our tools should be seen as a gateway into impactful approaches like Tor, VPN, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, and the EFF at large.

In all interviews I make sure to explain that while this is an amusing form or protest, it is not effective and people who care need to go take the steps outlined on the project page.

A website can do this. A chrome plugin, however, risks being harmful with minimal benefit. It minimizes the potential for communication to your audience, it is also harder to access which means you are touching a more narrow audience.

Here's the good news! The project I linked to is open source -- https://github.com/slifty/internet_noise/ -- you could contribute to it directly and then update your plugin so that instead of generating noise and hijacking their browser information you just direct them to the website version of the concept.

I created something similar yesterday afternoon [0]. Instead of opening a new tab, it just requests pages through a hidden iFrame and drops the headers so the request goes through.

It doesn't click on anything, because it would be awkward if this by chance started sharing things on logged-in Facebook profiles etc. I plan on adding sequential requests over the weekend so the traffic is more realistic.

It's open source and on Github, so you can download, install and modify it from there if you wish [1].

While I applaud the authors for trying to solve a problem, I will not install this plugin unless its open source. There is no way I'm going to grant the above permission to some random plugin just because they tell a compelling story.

IMO this is taking the wrong approach. Why spread your data accross more site, when the problem is the individual sites you visit - not random ones you don't? This (dead) project of mine sends similar data to the site you are currently on - but instead of noise it is purposely malicious and will ruin the website owners tracking abilities if used at scale.

I've been thinking about building something similar since the first Snowden leaks. I figured encrypted traffic to various locations would be useful considering that security agencies store everything until they can decrypt it at a later date. Unfortunately I'm not well-versed enough in implementing proper encryption and I'd probably just end up shooting myself in the foot.

A long time ago I tried to delete my Facebook and realized it only deactivates until next login. You have to specifically request that they permanently delete it or something. And, it's not even clear if FB still doesn't store your info or not after that whole process (little sketch to be fair...).

So I came up with this idea that I'd make a service called socialfacewash.com that just completely trashes your digital profile (liking random things, changing your info, and just basically obfuscating what FB thinks they know about you).

I never built it though, but I kind of wish I did. Still own domain if someone wants it.

Trend seems to be that we're not going to have protections over our own digital privacy/data for a very long time. Maybe a service that could at least mask, lie, trash, obscure our footprint for everyone else would be nice to have.

I'm not sure I understand the point of this -- marketers will just discard this random data that doesn't match a human access pattern.

If this anonymized my tracking data for sites I visited, that would be useful, but sending a bunch of random hits doesn't seem like it will keep anyone from tracking my activity which is what I want to shield.

Maybe I am being too naive, but could someone explain to me why just using a VPN would not be good enough to hide your traffic from these companies / governments?

I understand that perhaps they _could_ ask the VPN provider to give logs (depending on the provider, if they keep logs or not). But that would not work for the algorithms used to target you as an individual.

What exactly is the point? If the FBI suspects you in a case of the international heist of carrots and your search history includes "consealed carrot transportation" and "circumventing carrot museum security", it doesn't matter what else you googled. It only matters that this is included in it.

I had an idea a few years ago to make a chrome plugin that would send encrypted emails (containing a randomly generated message) to all sorts of Muslim country email addresses, helping to reduce the fruitfulness of encryption circumvention and surveillance.

It's a nice marketing stunt -- not meant to be perjorative, I hope it inspires more innovation in this space. But I find it ironic that a plugin that purports to make it harder to track you has google analytics.

This is going to get complicated, and probably nasty. The interests of Uber and Levandowski no longer align. That's not unusual, although it usually comes up more in criminal cases.

Amusingly, Google's employment contract, which specifies binding arbitration for employee-employer disputes, may have backfired on Google. Google did take Levandowski to arbitration. But Google can't bind Uber via their employee arbitration contract. So now Google is suing Uber, and Uber and Levandowski are arguing that Google can't sue because it insisted on arbitration in the employment contract.

Anthony Levandowski isn't just a schlub caught up in a big lawsuit. He's the guy who's self-funded startup got bought for $680M. He's facing a lawsuit from Google.

Did anyone have any sort of impression that he was going to cooperate out of the gate? There's a better chance that he drops his pants and asks for a spanking.

Yes, the 5th Ammendment can be used as negative inference in a civil suit. Whatever. This isn't testimony. This is discovery. It's years before this gets in front of a jury and it won't matter one iota when all is said and done.

This is a marathon of a fight. Levandowski just signaled that he's not an idiot.

The number of armchair lawyers here who believe that they understand the fifth amendment is impressive.

You can hold the fifth amendment against people in civil trials in federal court.See, e.g., 425 US 308, 318"Our conclusion is consistent with the prevailing rule that the Fifth Amendment does not forbid adverse inferences against parties to civil actions when they refuse to testify in response to probative evidence offered against them: "

There is a well-established test for when negative inferences may be drawn.

Note also that federal courts can force the witness to take the stand and invoke the privilege in front of a civil jury.

Even further, federal courts may allow an adverse inference against a company from an employees or former employees invocation of the Fifth Amendment.

> In the transcript of a private hearing before Judge William Alsup in United States District Court in San Francisco, Mr. Levandowskis lawyers said he was invoking his Fifth Amendment right to avoid incrimination in turning over documents relevant to the case. Ubers lawyers said they have made clear to Mr. Levandowski that he needs to release any documents relevant to the case as part of discovery.

Does Levandowski also have his own lawyers? Says here that his lawyers said he was invoking his 5th amendment, while Uber lawyers said he needs to turn over all documents

Nobody yet has mentioned the big picture. To me the big queston is: How the fuck do Levandowski and Kalanick still have jobs at Uber?

If I were on the Uber Board of Directors, I would be pushing for armed security to escort those two clowns out the door. Immediately. As in today. And I'd give them a cardboard box with all their personal shit in it for them to carry out with them.

At what point in time does a company Director become complicit in theft of IP? What did the Uber board know, and when did they know it?

I predict that, any day now, there will be mass scurrying of rats abandoning a sinking ship.

All IMO of course. As they say on the TV show Cops (more or less): all suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

A few days ago there was an article posted on HN (I think it was from Medium ) that provided a really long and detailed timeline of the events. How and when Kalanick and Levandowski met, when was the acquisition confirmed and so on. Anyone has it please?

While I do respect the right to protect your IP, Uber is 10 times smaller company than Google. The lawsuit is about technology that can potentially save thousands of lives and probably will be made open source in few years anyway.

The irony of YC's flagship startup forcing exploding term sheets on their customers is a bit much to take.

[ps]

Airbnb's statement concluding this story says that this interaction fell short of their expectations. Maybe they can go a bit farther. Can they commit (just a comment here would suffice) to not using the exploding-settlement tactic with their clients? Maybe all they'd really need to say is that nobody outside their counsel's office will ever be authorized to put an explicit time limit on any offered settlement.

What's going on here? The first half of the story sounds like routine corporate incompetency. Representatives don't read your stuff, can't be bothered to follow their own procedures, and screw you over. Unacceptable but, alas, fairly common when dealing with big companies.

The NDA is where it goes off the rails. He's entitled to that money, so why would they try to put conditions on it? I'm sure they're not thrilled to have him talking, but it's not like they have a choice in the matter. Once someone who is allowed to use their brains got involved, the result should have been a quick payment and an end to the saga.

I have a friend who literally had the exact same experience a week ago. She rented her apartment to a guy for one night, and he proceeded to have a massive party filled with drugs, prostitutes, and God knows what else. Her apartment was subsequently degraded and destroyed beyond all recognition.

Thus far, Airbnb's response to her has been extremely non-reassuring. Hopefully they will do more in the coming week and remedy the situation. If not, expect a longer post with pictures soon.

It's stuff like this that gives Airbnb a bad name, and makes many people hesitant to ever use the service. I hope someone at Airbnb realises that pinching pennies and not helping hosts when they get screwed, is really going to hurt Airbnb itself in the long run.

Not defending Airbnb's behaviour, but this sort of thing happens outside of Airbnb too. I had some tenants (sons of a well known rock star) cause around 10K worth of damage to my flat in Shoreditch (plus around 5K in lost rent given the amount of time it took to repair) a few years back. In that case the letting agency I used was no help because they said it was a private matter between myself and the tenants, the insurance was no good because they said that amount of damage could not be accidental and they didn't cover malicious damage, and the legal system was no help because it favours tenants. In fact I might even have been better off with Airbnb.

I don't understand how people could do that much damage and it would only come to $8k. Just the cleanup and repairs to the complex outside of his property should be nearly that much; losing his lease, other damages, and damage to his property should be a lot more than that.

Is it correct that the article asserted damages assessed at USD 8K but offered to reimburse just under USD 2K?

I could be overreacting to this, but I had a really strong reaction to this article. I'll preface relating this by stating that in pretty much everything, I would usually side with the large company or startup. Just my point of view. I'm not overflowing in sympathy for people complaining about dealing with companies or large bureaucracies because in my experience that arises from people's insufficient understanding of how to operate with a company or large bureaucracy to their advantage. Most of the time I'd be like, people should learn to be smarter.

With that disclaimer aside this story made me super angry. How could AirBnB treat this person like that? Clearly guests had defrauded AirBnB's system, and the host suffered. The host should be totally compensated.

If this was my company, in an extreme case like this, I'd send out an AirBnB rep to do a damage assessment and collect evidence. And then, not just to be awesome, but to protect AirBnB against bad PR, and to encourage AirBnB to develop more robust guest fraud detection, I'd compensate as a policy 20 - 25 % over the amount. So this guy would get USD 10K and hands on treatment.

A complication I'm not considering is -- who is owed the damages, the guest or the landlord? But the idea above would be indicative of my response, and how I think they should have done this.

I super hate it to read great PR about AirBnB doing awesome things and then to see something like this. And the dereliction and indifference exhibited by the email chain...so angry. The worst thing is: you can judge a person ( and a company ) by how they treat people they don't think they need to treat well. So when AirBnB makes money out of you, and you use their shiny site, everything is grand. But when you suddenly suffer and need their help, their action falls well below their promise.

Like I said, maybe I'm overreacting or not seeing this clearly. But on the face of what I saw this is how I took this. So angry!

A friend of mine is having similar issues with a neighboring apartment in their building in a more suburban neighborhood of NYC. Large parties of seemingly underage kids have been renting the apartment upstairs, throwing weekend long parties, and trashing the surrounding area (using the side of the house as a bathroom, for instance). The landlord doesn't seem to care since the unit would otherwise be empty and he can make the same rent in a weekend as he would in a month. That building doesn't seem to be the only one doing the same thing in the neighborhood.

I had never really thought of kids using AirBnb like that before, but it makes sense. When I was a teenager parties happened when people's parents went away for the weekend. Now an older kid can get a credit card, create a fake profile, rent an apartment for the weekend, charge a fee at the door, and have at it.

Tangentially, as a guest, I've found a new (to me) use for Airbnb -- renting places in areas I'm considering a long lease or purchase. And for "work from home", it's actually possible to check with hosts and verify good Internet (in WA, Wave G or Frontier FIOS or something), which is a lot harder in hotels.

Hard to say what I'd do when I haven't been in that situation, but in a past dispute with a large company, I felt I had the freedom to make them pay for their desired confidentiality. (It wasn't quite like this situation, but somewhat similar.)

I demanded a 60% premium over their "final" offer for the confidentiality clause. They told me to take a walk, but reversed and paid after my lawyer contacted them. (the 60% was basically pulled out of my nether bits; it was a wild guess at what they might value it at.)

I'd recommend anyone in a similar situation putting a price tag on the gag clauses, if they can afford it. Aside from many other issues, it is a nasty tactic that is bad for markets, because it increases economic inefficiency by increasing information asymmetry.

You'd think Airbnb would be absolutely horrified of stories like this. How many hosts does this incrementally deter from using Airbnb?

Additionally, their SLAs for customer support are incredibly user-hostile, bordering on actively so. Look at how Amazon can do things better - no questions asked refunds and generally 24 hour SLAs on contact.

How can Airbnb fail so hard on realising that an internet business, such as theirs, lives and dies by customer trust...

> This was all too reminiscent of the NDA Tesla asked customers to sign last year after a defect was discovered, a request that was deemed unacceptable by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (which issued the warning about the defects).

How are the biggest and trendiest companies getting away with this kind of despicable behaviour? The lack of regulation in intervention here is especially troubling.

Why do people find it surprising that companies who exist mainly on the premise of ignoring laws/regulations they find inconvenient, won't eventually ignore laws/regulations that you think worthwhile (ie Uber and sexual harassment and AirBnb and paying for damages).

In addition, I find it interesting that the host is only sending a bill for $8000. It seems as if he is only trying to get paid for his damages and not even considering the damage and disruption to his neighbors (who unlike the host are wholly blameless in this manner). It seems AirBnb attracts the jerks and freeloaders.

I find it shocking that someone thought it was a good idea to list a flat on airbnb that they're only renting themselves. Largely in England subletting is not allowed under the terms of rental agreements.

Their business model seems to rely on people willing to roll the dice on their safety and security to save (or earn) a few bucks! It will undoubtedly survive this little blip of negative publicity, but people really need to be wary of this organization's complete lack of customer service (when things go bad).

there are endless stories like this with AirBNB. They are right in that they have millions of successful bookings and these one-off scenarios are the exception to the rule, but they are being very unprofessional in the way they handle these matters. I would lawyered up as soon as they started dickin me around.

Unless I've overlooked something, the NDA seems to work largely against Airbnb. It limits their liability to this payment, and compels the host to provide "reasonable cooperation", but on confidentiality it only states:

> I acknowledge that the existence of the payment by Airbnb and this Airbnb Payment Agreement are confidential.

There seems to be nothing stopping the host from continuing to assert "Airbnb customers wrecked my flat; Airbnb provided terrible support and miscalculated damages".

I don't see the appeal of airb&b. I don't want strangers in my home when i am not there to monitor my stuff. That's crazy. And i keep horror stories like this, just read one about a trashed apt in toronto. And i travel a lot and when i do i go through established agencies for rentals. I'm in Bali now, got a great house for a good price through traipadvisor.

Airbnb guests constantly rent my place to party. It's been a problem for years, at both of my homes. I block many of them, but can't detect them all. The other day an airbnb guest held a party, and they trashed my neighbor's balcony (below mine).

They need to get partying off the platform. It's terrible for neighbors and hosts, and it's not even much revenue; the partiers usually book for one night. Regular guests on average stay 4-5 nights.

You profit by making and end-run around decades of law and regulation -- much in place for a purpose and to make the lives of long-term tenants and owners tolerable and predictable.

It sounds as if you've now also gone full-on into the typical modern corporate "customer support" model.

Everything driven by lawyers and "risk minimization." Purposeful process dysfunction to discourage and kill as many claims and as much financial demand as possible. Support staff who know nothing of the circumstances and who furthermore refuse to inform themselves as to same. Escalating pressure to accept low-ball settlements with included gag-provisions, when the more persistent claimants don't simply give up. Real, effective response and recompense dependent upon the level of "bad PR" and perceived need for "damage control."

Hmmm...actually the most clearly unethical act was not the low ball offer, the deadlines, or the non-disclosure request--it was the repeated insistence by "Peter" that "the decision reached in this case is final, and cannot be overturned" which is a blatant lie.

The Airbnb Host Guarantee clearly lays out an arbitration process in case of any dispute.

General. You and Airbnb agree that any dispute, claim or controversy arising out of or relating to these Airbnb Host Guarantee Terms or the breach, termination, enforcement, interpretation or validity thereof, or to the use of the Services or use of the Site or Application (collectively, Disputes) will be settled by binding arbitration. You acknowledge and agree that you and Airbnb are each waiving the right to a trial by jury or to participate as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class action lawsuit, class-wide arbitration, private attorney-general action, or any other representative proceeding. Further, unless both you and Airbnb otherwise agree in writing, the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one persons claims, and may not otherwise preside over any form of any class or representative proceeding. If this specific paragraph is held unenforceable, then the entirety of this Dispute Resolution section will be deemed void. Except as provided in the preceding sentence, this Dispute Resolution section will survive any termination of these Airbnb Host Guarantee Terms.

Arbitration Rules and Governing Law. This agreement to arbitrate evidences a transaction in interstate commerce, and thus the Federal Arbitration Act governs the interpretation and enforcement of this provision. The arbitration will be administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) in accordance with the Consumer Arbitration Rules (the AAA Rules) then in effect, except as modified by this Dispute Resolution section. (The AAA Rules are available at http://www.adr.org or by calling the AAA at +1 800 778 7879.) The Federal Arbitration Act will govern the interpretation and enforcement of this Section.

Arbitration Process. A party who desires to initiate arbitration must provide the other party with a written Demand for Arbitration as specified in the AAA Rules. (The AAA provides a form Demand for Arbitration. https://www.adr.org/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_FILE&dDocName=A... ) The arbitrator will be either a retired judge or an attorney licensed to practice law in the state of California and will be selected by the parties from the AAAs roster of consumer dispute arbitrators. If the parties are unable to agree upon an arbitrator within seven (7) days of delivery of the Demand for Arbitration, then the AAA will appoint the arbitrator in accordance with the AAA Rules.

Arbitration Location and Procedure. Unless you and Airbnb otherwise agree, the arbitration will be conducted in the county where you reside. If your claim does not exceed $10,000, then the arbitration will be conducted solely on the basis of documents you and Airbnb submit to the arbitrator, unless you request a hearing or the arbitrator determines that a hearing is necessary. If your claim exceeds $10,000, your right to a hearing will be determined by the AAA Rules. Subject to the AAA Rules, the arbitrator will have the discretion to direct a reasonable exchange of information by the parties, consistent with the expedited nature of the arbitration.

Arbitrators Decision. The arbitrator will render an award within the time frame specified in the AAA Rules. The arbitrators decision will include the essential findings and conclusions upon which the arbitrator based the award. Judgment on the arbitration award may be entered in any court having jurisdiction thereof. The arbitrators award damages must be consistent with the terms of the Disclaimers and Limitations of Liability section above as to the types and the amounts of damages for which a party may be held liable. The arbitrator may award declaratory or injunctive relief only in favor of the claimant and only to the extent necessary to provide relief warranted by the claimants individual claim. If you prevail in arbitration you will be entitled to an award of attorneys fees and expenses, to the extent provided under applicable law. Airbnb will not seek, and hereby waives all rights it may have under applicable law to recover, attorneys fees and expenses if it prevails in arbitration.

Arbitration Fees. Your responsibility to pay any AAA filing, administrative and arbitrator fees will be solely as set forth in the AAA Rules. However, if your claim for damages does not exceed $75,000, Airbnb will pay all such fees unless the arbitrator finds that either the substance of your claim or the relief sought in your Demand for Arbitration was frivolous or was brought for an improper purpose (as measured by the standards set forth in Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11(b)).

A lot of confusing points to this story. I'm not defending AirBnB, but this story does baffle on a number of levels.

> (they came with a professional sound system)

How do you not see this coming, from a host perspective? Big red flag. How this get anywhere near as far as it did? "Well I figured the professional sound system was going to be fine in my apartment complex."

> Neighbors called the police five times and some partiers left, but most remained and locked themselves inside to continue partying.

If the police want to enter a home, and the owner of the home agrees to it, since when do the people in the home get a say as to whether or not the police can/cannot enter?

AirBnB handled this very poorly, but why is AirBnB fully responsible for this? I get that they're trying to attract people to put their homes on their service, and they offer to be responsible, but why can't Dinulescu go after the idiots who did this to his apartment directly? Why can't AirBnB do that?

How can a person go into another person's home, as a guest, do something like this, and not be held responsible, either civilly or criminally?

What makes Fuchsia different then so many other attempts at writing a new OS? They aren't writing a new OS, at least, not in the complete sense.

They are using the IPC system developed in and extracted from Chrome. They are drawing everything in userspace with fast graphics render but the logic for all system components written in Dart from the Flutter project. They use musl for the libc. They are using the little kernel for the core kernel.

As a long time Linux desktop user myself, I'm really excited about this project. A secure desktop without tons of system calls? Userspace graphics? Not HTML/JS based? But could still be used for development? Yes Please!

Capability-based operating systems must be the future. If they are not, then we are all doomed to continue to exist in a messy world where security problems crop up every minute. Capability-based access controls are one of the best options for getting out of our current mess, but they're also the type of thing that must be implemented very low in the system in order to work.

Hopefully, when we start ripping out *nix before 2038, Fuscia and other capability-based OS's can take over.

I've been waiting for this to be released. I suppose everyone has been.

Capabilities. Like fine grain locks, these are very powerful and very hard to get right. That's the lesson from Hydra, the 432, .... No, it's not a hard mechanism for the microkernel to get right; it's a hard policy for the application programmer to get right. However, that's probably more of an opportunity rather than meant as a criticism. Our tools are massively more evolved than they were in the 70s. It'll be interesting to see what happens with capabilities.

C++. Oh lord. Why are you writing a microkernel in C++? If there was anything they learned from L4 (Xen, Linux, ...) it is that C is sufficient. Why do you want to implement something small with something that is large? This one is a real head scratcher.

Provably secure. They did this with the SEL4 microkernel so this is a doable thing. If they're going to hang their hat on security (capabilities, microkernel, ...) there's no excuse for not having done this already and delivered a provably secure microkernel out of the box.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What youre referring to as Fuchsia, is in fact, GNU/Fuchsia, or as Ive recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Fuchsia. Fuchsia is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Fuchsia, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Fuchsia, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.

Are there enough clues to figure out if this is intended to eventually displace Android, ChromeOS, the Ubuntu distribution most googlers use on their company machines, or the Linux they run their data centers?

As far as I know, Google hasn't telegraphed the purpose of it. I can't tell if it's targeted at all, none, or some of the above.

People that question the existence of Fuchsia need only remember why Chrome was created. A lot of people thought Google was wasting their time by building a browser, including Eric Schmidt, and look how that turned out. Now, I'm not saying that Fuchsia will have the same success as Chrome, but it's clear that they think that having an OS that they can control the direction of is important to them.

I don't understand what the value is in writing a new original microkernel from scratch in this day and age when sel4* is free and open source, performance tuned for 20ish years, is security hardened, and is provably correct for both security and features?

Lots of interest in Microkernels since everyone got tired of kernel vulnerabilities. So who won the TanenbaumTorvalds debate? It is too soon to say (Zhou Enlai said that of the French revolution - almost 200 years after the fact)

The article says that the focus is on 'PCs, tablets, and high-end phones'. Wouldn't a more secure OS be relevant to server environment? Is the performance cost of a microkernel considered to be too high for a server OS? Is it too difficult to do?

That whole handle idea of the 'capability' system, but especially its implementation with 'handles', sounds exactly like Win32 to me. I haven't looked at the source, can anyone confirm or explain what exactly is different?

I see great advantages to offering a POSIX compatibility layer. It can be sand-boxed to the app's context instead of making it a system wide dependency. Getting existing apps to run out of the box, and then convincing them to adapt a leaner, narrower set of system calls is probably more valuable than requiring from-the-scratch development.

> The default Fuchsia filesystem, called minfs, was also built from scratch. The device manager creates a root filesystem in-memory, providing a virtual filesystem (VFS) layer that other filesystems are mounted under. However, since the filesystems run as user-space servers, accessing them is done via a protocol to those servers. Every instance of a mounted filesystem has a server running behind the scenes, taking care of all data access to it. The user-space C libraries make the protocol transparent to user programs, which will just make calls to open, close, read, and write files.

I can see the major point of making a microkernel is to allow kernel or other service (like driver) upgrade to be de-coupled; it would also allow much easier integration of non-open source driver and service, which could be a pain with Linux as it doesn't provide a clean way to do without rebasing (which could explain why Android upgrade is much lag behind for existing phone). But don't get me wrong, I totally support Linux philosophy.

Fuchsia sounds awesome. Allowing user space processes to do more of their own work frees up the kernel from providing standardized interfaces to hardware.

This makes it significantly easier to build a closed platform with unbreakable barriers between processes, and this is a great thing in terms of security and fine grained access controls for each process. Individual process isolation is extremely important for most of todays use cases where only a single user is logged into each system at one time and most running code is trusted.

In practice this means you can prevent user space processes from accessing anything you don't want them to touch while still giving them substantial low level access. This will be a boon with device makers because it allows them to preventing a users apps from compromising the carrier experience. Companies like Google will also have less concern about users installing malware like ad blockers. The movie and music industry will also greatly appreciate an operating system finally designed for 21st century IP protection. This will even be embraced by hardware manufacturers since they no longer need to provide open source drivers for their hardware that could be ported to other platforms. Overall a win-win for everybody.

In the end we can trust that this will result in a better user experience with more secure apps and devices.

Did anyone hear the whispers of Xooglers a few years back talking about "big changes" coming to Android that were absolutely horrible for users and done to placate industry? Hmmmm... This Fuscia thing looks pretty suspicious.

Google has repeatedly prommised, and failed to build a lightweight open OS. Every time they have produced one it was full of bizzare political constraints and closed source spyware. I would be shocked if this time was any different.

So many commenters are giving the customer a hard time for realizing, "99% of my budget is spent on zero value, i.e. fraud."

The biggest lie the online advertising industry has sold is aggregate statistics. Of course a handful of traffic sources convert massively while the supermajority (99%) don't convert at all. Advertising intermediaries rely on the statistical mean to hide all the garbage in the gold. It should surprise no one that for the vast majority of customers, like Chase, conversion as a function of source is skewed.

I suspect too many ad tech companies rely on the ignorance of their customers to make money. They monetize the basic math of "if it's more than break-even, it's working"in other words, their objective is to take as much ad budget as possible while still delivering a profitable conversion for the customer. By simple math, ad tech uses garbage inventory until the customer's profit is close to but above zero. It works, and you'd have to be a real blowhard to believe that it's not how the ad tech ecosystem works.

That ad-tech does this by laundering e-mail spam, blogspam and other forms of spam into Google AdWords: that's the real fraud. All those Googlers then go on to pretend like it's not happening.

I mean, what 400,000 sites do you think Chase was advertising on? Ones that really have to do with banking? Or just ones that, by some idiotic metric, have a keyword that ".equals('banking')"?

I would love for someone at Google's direct navigation ads (or whatever ridiculously obscuring name they're called now) to come out and say how "Nobody clicks twice [on spam ads] by accident." It's like they inhabit a make-believe universe. The ad exchanges aren't ignorant: they're facilitating the massive fraud of their own customers.

This is definitely an interesting tactic, but this is a pretty poor article.

#1. Chase is claiming performance hasn't been affected, but it has only been a couple days since they made changes. With display you can't measure performance in only a few days.

#2. The author confuses the number of sites with the number of impressions. Chase is buying the same number of impressions - if everyone else followed this strategy it wouldn't hurt exchanges. It would have weird outcomes, but if the same volume is served the exchange makes the same amount (excluding data costs and how cpm would be affected, etc).

The fix to online ad fraud is obvious: CPA (Cost per action). If a signup occurs, then you pay for the ads. If a user pays for the service, then you pay for the ads. It would align the incentives of the advertisers (people paying for ads) and the ad networks (google). Currently it is the ad networks incentive to use CPC and to hide fraud by not releasing traceable ids, allowing clicks from bots/proxies/adsense holders and allowing ads on unrelated content which cause accidental clicks. CPA would incentivize the advertisers (people paying for ads) to commit the fraud by not reporting the action. This would be easier to maintain since the people paying for ads is a much smaller set. BUT - from my experience there would be almost no money in this system for Google since most of their income is from fraud.

While the premise of the article is reasonable, the evidence is flimsy. This seems like an example of NY Times defending their turf. We've seen numerous [1] examples [2] lately of legacy media companies trying to drive advertisers away from new media sites and Youtube by discrediting sites as "fake news" and by running hit pieces on popular Youtube personalities.

I mean, just look at the author's latest articles. 5 of the last 6 (including this one) disparage advertising on new channels! [3] Targets include Youtube, Snapchat, Breitbart, and Google (in general).

The legacy media is just not well suited for the current state of the world. Breaking news comes first through Twitter now. Investigative journalism doesn't require a big budget to make high quality content any more. As for political commentary, many people would rather listen to a well-educated everyman craft videos on Youtube than listen to the millionaire personalities on Fox News talk about how the Democratic party doesn't understand the proletariat.

My mate worked at a giant ecommerce company, it would send hundreds of millions of e-mails a month... and with virtually no performance evaluation (only high level stats which are by no means actionable). It took a single SQL query to propose cuts to traffic in the order of 20% with ~zero loss in revenue.

I remember attending a talk, where this guy talked about their freemium app used by dozens of millions of users. Their in-app popups were cut by 30% or so without losing revenue, all thanks to a few simple if statements (they tried machine learning as well, but this did it).

One can only wonder how much of this excessive advertising there is, I guess it's mostly driven by absolute revenue numbers without much consideration for costs and efficiency.

I recently saw a talk by Foster Provost, a big ML guy at NYU. The main points of his talk were that using fine-grained behavioral data (like browsing history) is better than demographics (at least in his context: predicting ad lift), and he proposed a way to interpret the model (somewhat). I left feeling disappointed. His system for interpretation was super post-hoc and tenuous, IMHO. It felt like a computer scientist doing social science (because it was).

I think ML is great for lots of things, but there are still lots of problems with using it in systems with humans.

An example: if you do a Google search for "Amazon <some book>" then you'll almost always get an ad from Amazon. So Amazon pays for a click that would have happened anyway. Maybe Amazon does this to crowd out other advertisers, but maybe it's just the algorithm being stupid and nobody is watching.

I work for a biggish company and sit near the marketing department. They report similar results, if not quite so dramatic. Advertising isn't incremental. Sometimes there's only so much demand for your product and you can only change that so much with marketing or promotion.

Can we talk about the fact that "an intern" had to filter through 12,000 websites and make a judgement call for a second here?

Also - I presume the spending was the same in both cases - just focused. If so, the risk here is that you may miss out on a new up and coming blog "exploding" onto the scene. However, all it would take to "reset" is next quarter, "tasting" ads on 400k sites again, paying an intern (again) to filter the ones that led to revenue, and creating yet another list.

So, they run their campaigns with an open targeting and then they trimed the websites to the ones users clicked, and then, selected which ones had better brand value for them. That's simple optimization and they should have always been doing that.

The question arrises when you have to start from scratch. They would also have to start with an open targeting to learn what performs for them.

An important difference between buying ads on 400k sites and 5k sites is the margin for the middlemen. The money is going to get spent anyway, so the middleman needs to optimise his take.

The bigger the sites; the more leverage they have over middlemen. The lower the fees exchanges/ssps can collect - for big sites (ones people have actually heard of) the fee is effectively zero, and are needed by exchanges as loss leaders to attract any demand. Little sites with no leverage will expect to pay around ~70% to the middlemen (although not all of that will be disclosed).

True story: about 250 domains will get you above 98% of online population in most countries. This is plenty large enough for dvertisers to do all kinds of fancy targeting and optimisation within this pool.

The article doesn't mention the precise methodology for reaching the 5000 sites number, other than some human filtering being involved.

The precise wording of another section is also vague, the 'cost of an impressions' could mean either their total Internet marketing expenditure is the same (thus 395000 sites were largely ineffective and merely exposed them to risk and complexity) OR that they've reduced their spending by around 98+% with no appreciable change in effectiveness.

In their test they had 12000 clicks, and decided they only wanted 5000 of them. So they miss 7000 clicks, or more than 50%. How is that the same result?

I could understand if they found that click from certain sites did not lead to new business for them. But that is not what the article says. It says they didn't want those 7000 clicks because they were from sites they didn't like.

It seems to me they should already have figured out which sites bring them useful clicks long ago, in an automated way. Isn't that standard procedure for advertising? Then there would be no need for moral judgements. Of course they are in their rights to shut out sites they don't like. But not everybody who browses such a site has to be a believer, among other things.

I think drawing attention to such automated matches of ads can only produce losers. The sites lose out on ads, but the companies force themselves to become political, needlessly driving away users from the other political spectrum. (Again, I assume it is in every companies rights to do so, it just seems bad for business).

The irony is that it is so easy to track online conversions with a simple pixel or server postback. It's called performance marketing, or affiliate marketing, in the sense that the advertising websites then become what is commonly called an affiliate in online advertising lingo. There really is no reason to pay for impressions these days, unless you believe in a mystical (and suspicious IMHO) quantity known as "branding value".

With the magic of computers you could deliver 400k versions of your ad. Each tailored to the site where the ads are being displayed (or even more - tailored also to the specific user). Probably most of these sites have very distinct audience, so you could build quite targeted ads.

If you are just spamming the same ad everywhere, then I can certainly understand why it does not make difference if it appears on 5000 vs 400.000 sites if the ad display count stays the same.

The NYT arguing that one should only advertise on 'high quality websites' is the equivalent to a retailer arguing that you should only buy in store because all the online stores are full of fakes. Fits perfectly in line with their 'we report the truth and anything else is fake' narrative.

I would wonder if the whitelisting is in-house or part of their contract? If it's in-house then the added cost to maintain the whitelist (in-house expertise), while not much comparatively, isn't nothing.

This appears to be bitcode.It probably means they just starting making use of more metadata or something that is now included in the bitcode.

Bitcode also now deliberately trades off size vs speed and includes indexes used for LTO, etc.They could be including those.

You should almost always expect bitcode to get beat by "llvm-dis|xz", because the goal of bitcode is not to be the most compact possible format, but instead, a compact format the compiler can use effectively :)

Now, if actual on-device binary sizes increased, my guesses would be:

1. it now includes bitcode, or another architecture, in the binary (which would be interesting)

Note that the size increase is in the _bitcode_ portion of the binary. This slice is stripped from the binary before it makes it to the user's device. This means the size increase is merely an inconvenience during the development process, and has no impact on the size of apps as users see them.

So, the app explodes in size, and since almost no app provides a "clear cache/temp" feature, apps grow til you are crashing routinely. While iOS may clear some space when it feels like it, I have a monthly routine of deleting and reinstalling a slew of apps which take up gigs of space on the device after usage, even though they are just showing data stored on a server. I know, I shouldn't have to worry about this, that iOS will eventually clean it up... but when apps are crashing b/c they can't get space, I wind up having to manually step in.

So, a) for devs, if you think your app caches, provide a way to clear it (look at Opera's Coast browser, who puts it in the Settings app), and b) for users, if you think you are out of space, look at apps and compare app size to total space, and you'll find some hogs.

Isn't 10.3 the first version that is introducing the new APFS file system? If so, couldn't that have something to do with it? Does each app need to compile for both supported file systems now? I am not a LLVM expert but someone with more expertise on this subject might be able to say. I just found it odd that no one else here had mentioned it. It is the big update for 10.3

Apple charges $1200 to upgrade the latest touch bar rMBP from 512GB to 2TB of flash.

Let's not forget that they are a hardware vendor.

I don't think it's some grand conspiracy theory, but the interests of the vendor and of the user are not precisely aligned when it comes to efficient usage of storage. (The lack of stripping applications of their alternate language content on install/download also comes to mind.)

Could anybody here comment on the differences between spacex's engine, and the engines on the space shuttle?

I was under the impression that SpaceX was trying to make the first re-usable rocket stage, but I've recently found out that that isn't true. The space shuttle already holds that title.

I'm also kindof curious why they decided to go with a vertical-landing-design, instead of putting some wings on it and having it glide home like the shuttle did. Is that a weight-concern? Aerodynamics, mabye, but couldn't the wings be articulated in the same way that the landing legs are right now?

(I will admit some ignorance in this field. I'm definitely a fan, but I'm definitely not a historian or a rocket scientist)

Fingers crossed. In theory it shouldn't be any more dangerous than a first-time rocket, given that they've examined every inch of it and deemed it flawless. If it weren't flawless, obviously they wouldn't be trying to fly it. So we're just hoping there isn't some unanticipated source of entropy, so to speak. As always.

I'm pretty stoked we are staying right next to Jeti park on spring break and are planning on watching this launch tonight from the beach. We've got to see one other Delta IV launch, but really looking forward to seeing this one. We just missed OCSILY heading out to landing zone, but I got a good view of the parking spot and unloading area.

The BBC article doesn't use the word "today" anywhere in the text, nor does it provide a date. Does "X set to do Y later" in journalism-speak mean "later today" instead of "later somewhen"? Is this another idiosyncrasy like using commas instead of "and"?

reusability is the key to commodity rockets. look at the car and how depreciation works, people will own a rockets after 5 owners for a ridiculously cheap price. at that point fuel will be the number one cost issue and the fuel source will charge.

When you launch single-use rockets every next one is more advanced and reliable than the previous one. It includes some of the error corrections that were found during previous launches. This is an often ignored point.

I highly doubt that reusable rockets would be economically viable at our current state of material technology. We need better materials for the engines and the tanks to make them reusable. Even airplanes have to be retired when they still look new just because they've been through multiple pressurization/depressurization cycles and accumulated microfissures. Of course they are not even close to the levels of stress sustained by rockets.

How about instead of talking about whether Wikileaks is good or bad or whether you support them or not, let's talk about the content of the post.

From what I've read so far, this is pretty freaking cool. It's super interesting to read these docs and see their thought process involved, especially since the product their building is so different from what people are making on a day to day business. It actually looks pretty fun to work on. Also, I think it's neat to read about their need for developing frameworks that can be used around the agency to accomplish stuff.

Unfortunately, I didn't ready anything about self modifying code, which is probably the most difficult malware to detect and probably to write. Maybe it's in there though, I didn't read the whole document. I came to the comments about half way through to see dozens of people talking about whether they support Wikileaks or not which I think is fine, free country, but I'd like to actually know what some people who work with this kind of stuff think.

A framework for compiling to self modifying, yet correct, code wiukd be super cool. I wonder if it always has to be written by hand? Probably not but maybe that's a separate tool Wikileaks has yet to release.

I've really turned on Wikileaks. Itd be one thing if all the major powers had equivalent leaks publishing, but focusing on the US basically serves Chinese and Russian interests far more than it does the citizens of the US. String obfuscation isn't stemming from some corrupt deal that needs sunlight... this is just doing a disservice to their original mission.

Wikileaks is an organization built to destabilize the US government. Romantic and idealist stuff aside, they are playing the role of "useful idiot" for other intelligence agencies. And that is very dangerous.

Look at all the people complaining that wikileaks is anti-western and/or foriegn supported/agents with no proof of this whatsoever.

If anything wikileaks has shown a superior journalistic record in publishing whatever comes across their desk, so I don't see people criticising wikileaks on this the weakest of points as anything but intellectually dishonest at best.

It's funny to see how many educated people on HN expect to see something like "Russia / FSB / etc" hacking tools or documents leaks or whatever. Probably it's due to looking at how three letter agencies operate in first world countries someone would expect that you actually need that many people to steal some emails or get hands over company database.

It's obviously that no matter how big NSA conspiracy is every dollar spent, every meeting occur, every decision made all have to be controlled and documented. And any 3rd party company working for agency must have official contract, must report taxes and sometimes can even sell all the same tools for other governments. So it's thousand people participate at every single step.

In world of paranoid and corrupt ex-KGB mafia nothing like that required. All you need is just few experts and enough of money. Russia have plenty of online criminals: carders, illegal pharmacy and drug dealers, owners of credit card processings used for fraud, money laundering payment systems, botnet owners, spyware developers and most of them are controlled by state or somewhat under special agency protection racket.

Need 0-day exploit? Rootkit? Spyware? Any unique tools? Anything can is there for money! DDoS attack or a lot of proxy servers at any location needed? Plenty of services there and agencies obviously know owners. No documentation or reporting needed since corrupt government agencies are closely tied to those criminals for years.

So the same attacks that would involve at least few hundred of people in usual US three letter agency would likely require to just few dozens in Russia. What's more important no one would ever tell the difference between this activity and usual agency behaviour that related to usual corruption schemes.

So if you seriously think there is Russian government behind some attacks then shouldn't expect any leaks about that. If there is something important for Kremlin they wouldn't mind to dump money on it, but there will be very few people aware of it and of course there will never be any documents or other traces since they would be done as any other attack against commercial company or opposition politician.

One concern about Dropbox I have is its inability to establish itself beyond its File Storage / Syncing software. Salesforce.com, in comparison, has been acquiring companies left and right. Notable acquisitions of Dropbox, like Mailbox, have either shut down, or are nowhere on the impact map. As Dropbox user (albeit a free one), I don't find it useful for anything beyond synced storage (if there is any new addition in their interface, I might have missed it). After I started uploading pics on Google photos, I have little to store on Dropbox.

Synced storage might be big enough problem for it to continue to grow bigger, but I wonder if it's a meaningful moat. What if the storage + software gets commoditized to an extent that it becomes essentially free for most people?

Dropbox for Business has really changed my view of Dropbox the company. With AzureAD SSO integration, and the new Smart Sync feature, it's now possible to run a small company completely in the cloud, with terabytes of data in the cloud accessible to everyone without them synching it all to their laptop.

I've stopped using Dropbox for a few years already. Their software was good when I used it but I decided to boycott them after Condoleezza Rice joined their board. I just couldn't trust them with my data after that.

Plus, the fiasco they had with their Mac app comforted me in not trusting them

"Dropbox is the fastest SaaS company to reach $1 billion in revenue run rate" - given that, I don't care if they are profitable or not. They got to $1B faster than Salesforce, as long as they keep this up they'll be just fine.

I'll never understand why a company has to keep growing. Obviously I don't have a degree in economics, but why can't a company do well and then continue being so without having the need to innovate all the time? Sorry if I'm missing something big.

I love dropbox but I ended up on google drive. I happen to have a business email address with them and I got 30G free then updated. Dropbox is better than Google but I was already on Google. If they offered some sort of package like Google does, they could have more people onboard.

Actually box.com has several nice features by which they totally outperform Dropbox. One is for example the complete mess many Dropbox folders become, because you can drag an drop them around yourself, rename them etc. Look at anyone's Dropbox folder and things get quite messy rather quickly.

The problem with box.com is that there's no business support at all (nobody answers any emails). And in that regard Dropbox has been doing a really good job and put some effort into it. The product itself is not superior to box.com, quite in contrary actually, but the support is much better. (it's also quite easy since with box.com it's non-existent).

Cloud storage is a commodity business and race to the bottom: hard drive prices already got there as local backup. Failing to see what the ipo upside is here.

A bit melodramatic but the cloud is very new and untested against natural events such as a coronal mass ejection, which could wipe put huge amounts of stored data...the sort of thing that arguably should be in IPO risk lists but isn't...yet...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection

If only it didn't use ~1GB of RAM, I used to be a huge fan of Dropbox and I'm still looking for that feature in coding. Something like an auto-github diff upload. I saw some stuff with this I think regarding the particular text editor that I use.

My computer's are garbage that's why 1GB to Dropbox is a lot to me.

Edit: I'm curious how OneDrive compares. I have Windows on a junk laptop I have but I don't use it to work on (too weak). Maybe it has better idle RAM use.

I don't know about Dropbox but for example Twitter is still losing money since 2012. Twitter is way overvalue in the market and has lost around $2 billion since inception. Obviously it's not the same as 2000, these companies have revenue, but some of the are not making even a profit. If they continue to throw tech companies with revenue and losing money as IPOs prepare for the next tech bubble. It will burst.

It appears like Dropbox has ~2X the revenue of box with possibly higher costs in marketing and sales, since their investors are pushing for growth. Assuming these higher costs to be nullified by operating their own datacenters, their (fair) valuation is ~$5B. Anyone still wondering why they aren't hurrying to an IPO, what with a plum $10B private valuation and all

Way to go Dropbox. Just be prepared for when Operating Systems start shipping this functionality built-in. If you can prepare for that inevitable reality (by, say, providing modules or something for specifically that) then it'll all go great. Great werk so far. Started using dropbox in college and I am an extremely satisfied user. Let me just cue up some Fleetwood Mac

Why can't regular folks seem to get in on an IPO? (Admittedly, I don't understand how all the stock stuff works. It just seems like only big investment firms are the ones that are able to do initial investments.)

When I read safer language, 'Rust' came into mind automatically.. Not sure if 'Rust' will ever be as popular as golang but certainly see a future with it popping up everywhere mission critical / super safe software is required.

Rust is almost always going to win for any projects that take a 'gradually replace' approach, simply because it can interact so easily with C code in both directions (i.e. C calling Rust and Rust calling C) in a way that other languages can't, or can't without significant efforts/hassle.

The Rust team showed great foresight for bringing about those changes before the initial 1.0 release and it will pay off in spades.

Since bitexploder asked, I'll add what I wrote on this on other forums. If it's about secrets or anonymity, make sure you always use a safe language that supports careful control and reasoning about both memory and CPU time. The reason is that this enables covert, channel analysis for vulnerabilities that leak secrets through storage and timing. It's why I wanted Freenet to ditch Java aside from the obvious reasons. It's also why GC languages such as Go are better not used. Although, memory management where programmer controls timing & it's simple to analyze might be used. Reference counting comes to mind.

The other thing you want is proven, successful use in high-assurance systems. That is, systems that either didn't fail or provably couldn't in certain ways. These are almost all written in a subset of C or Ada/SPARK. The advantage of using those is you can combine them with a vast array of proprietary or open-source tooling to catch about any error you can think of if it's implementation. There's also formal specification and protocol analysis tools that combined with expert review can catch the rest. Rust, although a good choice for increased safety/security, doesn't have such tooling yet. That means they will get less correctness overall and over time vs MISRA-C or Ada/SPARK unless similar ecosystem in industry and CompSci emerges for Rust. That's why I recommend against it for high-assurance security for now.

It does seem good for medium-assurance security where you want to knock out low hanging fruit in systems code. It will avoid serious errors in C while providing additional benefits with type system and other features. Ada 2012 + SPARK 2014 are the standard for safe systems since they systematically eliminate all kinds of errors with a consistent design and tooling with decades of field success. I haven't seen a direct comparison with Rust on each protection to see if it matches it already or not. The main advantages Rust has over them are its borrow-checker for temporal safety, more usable method for safe concurrency, and (best for last) highly-active community to provide libraries or help. Go has similar benefits if its GC works with your use case but a lower, learning curve & possibly lower efficiency. Due to ecosystem benefits, these are main two I'm recommending for medium assurance if Ada/SPARK are too much to learn.

I like their approach of chipping away pieces instead of porting the whole system. It will result in better modularity and some generic libraries that can be used by other people. Seems like a win-win.

I live and love in Amsterdam and Golang seems to be the quintessential hipster language for this quintessentially hipster city.

Booking.com's soup du jour if you will.

Basically, if you aren't using JavaScript in a web shop, and you claim to be a "full-stack" "ninja", then probably you are using Go around here as a jobbing programmer.

I know that sounds terribly cynical and obviously a massive generalization but that is my personal experience.

I don't have a problem with Go per-se, but I do have a problem that a lot of people seem to go to extreme lengths to defend what someone else mentioned is frankly a pretty "mundane" language, citing memory safety, but more strangely portability and performance as its wonderful virtues.

When I meet with the zealots of the Go community around here I often have to quickly excuse myself with good grace.

Seriously, if that's what you want... go (pardon the pun) use C#, it is a saner and more expressive language, has a higher performance runtime and is way more portable with less vendor / career lock-in.

Go... I just don't get it.

Positives... Has a fairly nice package manager like npm.

Isn't made by Microsoft if that's your thing.

Oh and heaven forbid you don't have to think much... until you do because it is slow.

For a project like Tor though, which is damn slow as it is, I think it is totally the wrong choice.

Developers, please suck it up, get over it and learn C/C++ and some variation of Lisp.

Fine, go play with different languages for fun stuff. Use python for ML, try serious meta-programming in D, or jump into Haskell for kicks.

On the other hand modern C++ really can be a very safe language to work in if you can be bothered, and you are only deceiving yourself and your project going with something less sympathetic to the machine itself, especially if you are working on infrastructure level systems.

Sorry if this offends anyone, and of course it is just one opinion, but I think I'm being fairly nice as compared to what Linus might have said in comparison.

Basically stop it with the hobbyist shit. You are horrifying me and probably many others.

You aren't writing a web page here, so please treat the project seriously.